Rambler
3mo ago
Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade
If neither side fully escalates it is a matter of who is willing to escalate further. If both sides are willing to escalate, but stop short of nuclear weapons, there is no existent navel force, or combination of navel forces, which can sustain a Taiwanese blockade in the face of Chinese opposition.
Rambler
3mo ago
The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles do not exist in America and are unlikely to for the near future.
Rambler
3mo ago
his mother's Jewish
I have never heard this before. Would you happen to have a way for me to confirm that handy?
Rambler
6mo ago
Prison is effectively segregated by race in several states, most notably California.
Rambler
6mo ago
As Nybbler once succinctly put it, tribalism as a strategy dominants non-tribalism.
Rambler
6mo ago
If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers
When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.
Rambler
7mo ago
When you import ethnic groups you also import conflict between those groups.
Rambler
7mo ago
The Bolsheviks were heavily infiltrated by the Okhrana. To the degree that they had at least one, and perhaps several, high level meetings where nearly every person present was on the Tsar's payroll. (The degree of financial support I don't know.) Not only that but they Okhrana's strategy was to crush other more moderate groups, hoping the Bolshevik's radicalism would turn off 'normie' support. Needless to say, that strategy backfired.
Rambler
7mo ago
They'll still have most of what was once Red on their side, because they're the Legitimate Government and that matters.
As we have seen in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan the people who are on your side when the issue is purely theoretical, and when the risk is immediate and material, are not always the same people.
The people who take material action to assist outsiders are usually corrupt. They do not care about the outsiders, or their community. They care about the money. This pattern repeated itself in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Our allies took every dollar they could get and then did as little as possible (on average, there were of course exceptions). They exerted minimal effort and took as few risks as possible.
In all three cases the leadership of the boots on the ground trended toward telling their superiors what they believed their superiors wanted to hear. Those superiors then told Washington, and the public, that the situation was trending in a positive direction.
It was not. The Afghan security forces were not improving by the month. Our Iraqi partners in democracy were not developing robust systems of administration and government. The Vietnamese military was not rooting out corruption.
We have lost the same type of war three times in a row. Our performance in Afghanistan showed no meaningful improvement in outcomes relative to our performance in Vietnam. In fact, it was even worse.
I have no doubt red tribe areas would have some elements who side against their red tribe fellows. But all arguments I have observed as to why the US military would be successful this time are "cope", as the kids say. Lessons have not been learned. Material conditions on the ground are less favorable. The dynamics between recruitment, battlefield performance, and population demographics are a nightmare for a blue tribe domestic counter insurgency force. Surface area exposed to domestic enemy action is orders of magnitude greater. The force-to-space ratio for an occupying force is nightmarish. And this does not begin to cover the potential threat of geopolitical considerations.
I've read your comments for many years. You're one of the smartest people on the motte. But you are smoothing over the nuance of an incredibly complex dynamic with many externalities and permutations of neigh impossible to predict events interacting across interconnected domains.
You are arriving at a conclusion and stitching together facts to create a narrative that supports it. I am sorry to be so blunt. I have a lot of respect for your powers of intellect. But neither you, nor anyone else, can say what would happen in a large scale domestic insurgency without investing FAR more work.
Rambler
8mo ago
The colloquial sense absolutely matters here. If the people are to be governed by agents they select to carry out their wishes through the mechanism of the state, evidence that those agents may have accepted payments to enact the wishes of another party through the mechanisms of the state seems to me to be relevant to the people's decision making process.
Likelyhood of defection is highly relevant in optimizing agent selection.
Rambler
8mo ago
do you feel the same way about Kushner taking 2 billion dollars from Saudi Arabia months after playing a major role managing US relations in the middle east in Trump's white house?
Although he accepted the money after potentially influencing the behavior of the state and not before, I feel comfortable saying this is extremely suspicious and in absence of further information, a strong indicator of corruption in my eyes.
Rambler
8mo ago
Given the actual rioting, actual destruction, and actual deaths that I watched during the Antifa/BLM years, this seems to be a clear-cut case of rules for thee but not for me. Which is another way of saying that the de facto rule and the de jure rule have diverged until there is little similarity between them. This would be bad enough alone. However, it is made worse by the fact that this is an inversion of the spirit of law; the idea that there exists a neutral set of criteria by which behavior will be judged. This is important because it is this sense of objectivity from which much of law and order draws it's legitimacy. If one tribe, or both tribes, come to feel that a court of law is not a (mostly) objective mechanism through which decisions are arrived at by following a series of legible, impartial procedures, then they will arrive at the alternative conclusion: that a court of law is a mechanism by which to attack the opposing side using the resources of the state.
Rambler
9mo ago
If those imported engineers are capable of producing the same output for lower wages, then the privileged whites whom they displace have simply been competed out of the market.
Is the United States a country or a geographically defined economic zone?
Rambler
9mo ago
We do have gangs. These gangs are LARPers. Claims of gang membership from the white underclass in Appalachia are the number one way to separate the wheat from the chaff so far as who is a legitimately dangerous criminal and who is a degenerate with delusions of grandeur. These 'gangs' rarely create many social problems in Appalachia relative to other, more serious criminals.
Rambler
9mo ago
Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of romance between attractive famous male actors that take place in an exotic setting? Star Wars, or any other IP, may be the vehicle here, rather than the object.
Rambler
9mo ago
Developing video games is low status relative to working in Hollywood. Game dev is, on average, weighted toward hard skills where success in Hollywood is weighted toward soft social skills.
Rambler
10mo ago
Pop culture use of the word barbarian has created in my mind an image of a tall, muscular, aggressive male who is proficient with melee weapons and is not afraid to use them. I would guess most males would not be offended to be described as, or compared to, such a figure.
Rambler
10mo ago
For instance the invasion of Iraq imposed a cost rather than a benefit on the U.S. (as even most of its proponents knew it would)
Did they know that? I remember that time well and I recall many, many hours of debate with advocates of the Iraq war who spent a great deal of time telling me about the many benefits of victory in the Iraq war.
Sometimes I wish I had kept in touch with some of the more passionate voices. I'd be interested in hearing their perspective now.
Rambler
10mo ago
To my knowledge Ted Kaczynski was not a Christian. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. Nonetheless, he fought the fight he believed in, he finished his race, and to the best of my knowledge he kept the faith (a faith of his own invention, with it's holy text being Industrial Society and Its Future) until the end.
Rambler
10mo ago
Ted Kaczynski was one of the most brilliant writers I have ever had the privilege of reading. May he rest in peace.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. ~ Timothy 4:7
Rambler
1yr ago
I cannot speak for anyone else but I used Gillette from high school until the boycott and haven't used it (or any of the other brands it owns) since.
Deep down I wondered if I would really stick with it. But it was easier than I thought it would be; after choosing alternatives they became habitual and then my personal boycott, like much else in life, ran on autopilot.
Rambler
1yr ago
GPT-3s debating style is to restate its position again and again. Occasionally brushes up against the meat within the opposing point but never really engages. Its prose can change, especially if it is given a prompt it can understand (use no more than one adverb per 100 words, prioritize capital nouns and so on) but right now GPT-3 is hard to mistake in a back-and-forth.
Copy that.
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