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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26854 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?

There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:

Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.

It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.

Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.

So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.

How outside "normal" thought is wanting the Russia-Ukraine war to be more devastating so there is a greater number of (attractive and young) single female Ukrainian (and perhaps even Russian) refugees and migrants? I can't be the only one who just wished for it just a teeny tiny bit ? I'm sorry v(o)?l(o|a)dimir I know you would have done the same for me.

The animal part of my brain has definitely thought about the distortion of the european sexual market by some of the most beautiful women in the world and their dead male counterparts.

Anecdotally, my divorcee buddy who's living in Europe chained together at least one 8+/10 Ukrainian a month for quite a bit. Ironically ended up dating a Russian long-term.

Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.

I'm totally aware its a very vile thing to say, but my question is how vile is it to think? Maybe my model of my fellow man is way off, but I would be surprised if you explained the idea to 100 (non Russian/Ukrainian) men at least 30-40% don't buy into it. They would do it mostly secretly, but deep down in their hearts, they know what they want.

totally aware its a very vile thing to say, but my question is how vile is it to think? Maybe my model of my fellow man is way off, but I would be surprised if you explained the idea to 100 (non Russian/Ukrainian) men at least 30-40% don't buy into it. They would do it mostly secretly, but deep down in their hearts, they know what they want.

It is a socially unacceptable thing to say in the light of day (in comments that might be made public). I cannot tell whether you really think it is vile. For example, if someone did say it (giving voice to what you believe to be the sentiments of at least 1/3 of the male population), would you think that it revealed a serious moral defect in the speaker?

You're not alone: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXMjtVnLD4o

Harden your heart Putin, Increase your attacks, Banish them all to Palestine and we shall marry Ukrainian women!

Can't really respond to your thought experiment because I am Russian, so I feel like I've earned the right to wish my fellow male countrymen to go and gamble their life away.

What would be the version of your proposal from the Russian perspective? Chinese women fleeing from Taiwan war? American based tradgirls fleeing from civil war? Go ahead, tempt me with something plausible.

Which seems more vile to you?

"We should maximize the devastation of the war to get more women outside the war zone"

or

"we should maximize the devastation of the war to maximize the number of Russians killed and Russian wealth destroyed"

...Like, where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from? We're well past the point where people here make straightforward arguments in support of maximizing the misery of others because it provides benefits for ourselves.

where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from

The callous disregard for male life in the pursuit of matryoshka pussy?

Is it THAT different from much more popular "any Russian killed is a Russian who will not invade western countries"?

Eh its mildly different as it "triggers" the past-mra in me. The "male disposability" is a well cliched concern.

I think we can set the bar a little higher than "not the absolute vilest possible (relevant) thing you could say".

The later appears to me to be a mainstream position, not "the absolute vilest possible relevant thing you could say."

I seriously doubt there are very many people who want all that death and destruction for its own sake, at least excluding Ukrainians directly affected by the war. I'd like to think that's something people want instrumentally if they want it at all, certainly not as a terminal goal, and that most would prefer to minimize it all else being equal.

There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:

Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.

It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.

This doesn't sit right with me.

Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.

Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.

Historically women did not act as gatekeepers. Marriages we're arranged by the parents either directly or by making sure that your daughter only ever came in contact (socially) with acceptable matches.

Hasn't that really only been the case in (relatively) recent agricultural communities? Human sexual dynamics evolved during a period of time in which we were primarily hunter gathers, after all.

Agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations are definitely different enough to suggest that there's a genetic difference driven by evolution.

Nobody really knows what those societies were like since they predate writing. Our best guesses come from the handful of remaining hunter gatherer tribes which are all, by definition, extremely unusual in not having settled down or been wiped out.

Also the dynamics of saying No were different back in the day. Bachelorette status meant living at home under the parental yoke without any particular ability to earn funds independently.

If you're arguing that genes don't care about human happiness and that eventually (hundreds or thousands of years from now) maladaptive cultures like feminism will die out and be replaced by adapative ones like Hassidic Judaism, then yes, I agree.

But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness, and I think that feminism is working out very badly for women.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why, rather than just shrug and say "another person weeded out of the gene pool".

But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness

Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

Can you be more explicit about your point of contention with your friend? It seems to me like those things can both be true, and in fact reinforce each other. When people are meeting in person at social settings with a healthy gender ratio, two things happen. First, you just meet a lot more single people of the opposite gender. But also, the women are a lot more friendly and responsive. They'll talk to you, give you their number, maybe go on a date with you, just because "hey, why not, this guy seems nice." Whereas if you meet through something like online gaming, social media, or dating apps, they just get swamped with so much male attention from thirsty simps that they all have their guard up, and shut down any guy who they don't absolutely love.

They're absolutely not mutually exclusive - the point of contention is whether or not supposed female hypergamy accounts for the majority of the changes we're seeing in the dating landscape (my friend's POV is that it does).

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

Presumably, female standards are higher than male standards due to hypergamy. Also, men can marry later and still have a high chance of being fertile.

That said, I don't think women are to blame here. People are attracted to who they are attracted to. In fact, I think feminism hurts women more than men.

Yeah but for a male the process of going from the computer lifestyle to adequately interfacing with dating is likely going to equate to making a bunch of lifestyle changes and grinding away at social experience to be anywhere near competitive in the market. For a girl, you create a dating app profile and you can be awash in suitors within 3 hours unless you are like bottom 2 percentile attractive.

I spent about a year on the dating app grind recently enroute to finding a longterm partner, and to get to the point where I was getting consistent positive attention took about 6 month of self improvement between weight loss, social learnings etc and that's as a 6'4, high-earning white guy with low-moderate aspergers tendency. The NEET version of myself is likely still floundering around. I ended up going on about 70 first dates during that year (50~ of which came after I was 'reasonably attractive'), and it's pretty striking to me how many of the women I met who I didn't end up with seem to be still stuck in an endless singleton rut years after the event. Most of these women are attractive, intelligent, had good jobs, 25-30 years old, reasonable educations and ostensibly want kids/commitment yet I believe they are their own worst enemies in a lot of ways.

While filtering out "inadequate" suitors on the dating app (and I can bet there are many) might be easier than changing your lifestyle to adequately date, I don't believe it's no effort. Too many posters give off this "just get a good partner sis" message when they describe women's dating prospects, whereas "just clean up and be confident bro" doesn't work quite as well.

I've got close single female friends. They vigorously filter people who'd frankly be good enough for longterm partnership every week for all sorts of reasons. The majority of the women I met through the apps who I still have on social media are conspicuously single and/or making no progress towards their stated goal of settling down and having kids based on their stories and these aren't clubthots, majority are UMC, educated sensible women. Their main reasons for rejection all verge more around 'he was boring' or 'I did not feel he was my soulmate and my very being was electrified to be around him'. Admittedly feminine sexuality is a lot more 100-0 than male sexuality, but the current state of affairs is a vigorous own goal caused by that.

I agree on the advice criteria since, despite being significantly more difficult to achieve, 'just clean up and be confident bro' is way more actionable advice than 'stop looking for Mr. Perfect' but on the other hand I feel like the average male would be able to solve the dating woes of most women within a week if a freaky friday situation occurred.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

I mean, you buried it in your post: equal rights came without equal responsibilities.

Now that men and women are equal, should it not be equally valid to say "another woman weeded out of the gene pool"? If we're judging each gender by their own standards, women had it far easier than men and they're still failing, so why shouldn't men rejoice the same way women do when this happens to a man? They have equal rights, they can take equal lefts.

Not that I think that's a helpful way to look at things, but the only people who can meaningfully change this for women are other women. Do I think that'll happen? Well, maybe; men have largely adapted from losing 200,000 years of biological supremacy overnight by comparison and I see no reason women should not be similarly adaptable after losing their edge to video games and porn.

To clarify, I was saying "another woman weeded out the gene pool". And, yes, people do celebrate that. I'm conflicted whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen. A little bit of both I suppose, but my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today.

whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen

I think that in any stable system, there will be as many unmarriageable men as there are unmarriageable women, and I don't think that's a big deal. I think the reasons those people remain unmarriageable are intractable, and that their not reproducing is going to have a non-trivial eugenic effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).

my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today

I'm not as certain; a lot of parents get at least a little stupid when it comes to dealing with the most expensive luxury items they will ever purchase.
Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.

effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).

Mental illness is weeded out, but it has average heritability, and high IQ is weeded out, and it has high heritability so decreasing IQ will dominate.

Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.

Non-parent women can be quite risk tolerant when it comes to other people’s children for social engineering experiments in the interests of being decent people on the right side of history. Risk-seeking, even.

Out of the four combinations of parent/non-parent and men/women, non-parent women are the most ardent supporters with regard to minor LGBT+ exposure and subjecting Asian/white children to more “diverse” schooling. Other people’s children, by definition.

Self-control is a virtue? As I see it, society is degenerating because weak-willed people are removing the social stigma of whatever people usually do when they lack self-control. Casual sex is the first example which comes to mind, but in short I guess my point is that stoicism and self-control are related. I also think that progressiveness is a step away from the traditional strictness. It's like people have forgotten why we advocate against certain things, and they want the "freedom" or "liberty" to indulge in them without judgement. Take for instance "fat-shaming", rather than self-control in eating they'd rather punish the people who point out that obesity isn't attractive.

Don't get me wrong, I think your explanation is otherwise solid.

Personally I've notice a trend away from autism-like conduct and towards normie-like conduct. A transition from objectivity to subjectivity, one from technical correctness towards social correctness, from spatial intelligence to verbal intelligence. I guess "less masculine" fits all these boxes. Maybe this effect on society is partly explained by dropping testosterone levels or something. Some also mention demoralization (Yuri Bezmenov), oversocialization (Ted Kaczynski) and moral subversion (Nietzsche). I don't think it's a coincidence that "soy" is starting to become an insult. Am I becoming skizophrenic or is all this related?

I don't see this working for Ukraine, absent a teleporting device that can be deployed accurately en masse from distance.

A baby boom would need young women for which to enable the baby booming. And young Ukrainian women are in Europe living their best Tinder lives and riding the carousel.

It's just so over for the life prospects of (young) Ukrainian men in so many ways, especially romantically.

It's no secret that women love men in uniform

When in war-time, the men in uniform need to win first, at least temporarily (see: French women with German soldiers in WWII). At the minimum: not die. The latter is not guaranteed, much less the former.

Yeah, my theory was a nice thought but it's not going to happen for all the reasons that people posted. This forum found the holes pretty quickly.

And young Ukrainian women are in Europe living their best Tinder lives and riding the carousel.

That's nuclear-grade propaganda right there. If I was a Ukrainian man I would want to burn the world right now.

That's nuclear-grade propaganda right there. If I was a Ukrainian man I would want to burn the world right now.

The thought of getting sent by my government to be shot at and bombed while my countrywomen teehee and scamper away to fuck foreign men is some combination of massively infuriating, degrading, and demoralizing.

If I were Russian military leadership, I’d emphasize such points on social media for (young) Ukrainian men.

Airdropping on mobile (if that’s still a thing) and blasting on TikTok, Snapchat, Insta, VK and whatnot reels of seemingly limitless young Ukrainian women offering themselves up on dating apps/sites in Europe. Some bit about fighting for (magic) dirt and concrete while your (would-be) girlfriends and wives have already ditched you to do who-knows-what in Europe. Offer Russian citizenship to Ukrainian military men in exhange for surrender, no ‘gotcha’ clauses or hard feelings (and make good on that).

There are at least 6 million refugees and the overwhelming majority are women and children. Even if the fertility rate goes up there are going to be far fewer women of child bearing age left. Some will come back but that portion will only drop with time as they put down roots abroad and the situation in Ukraine deteriorates. I think Ukraine is screwed in the long run. The EU no longer has the economic vitality to build them up like they did Poland.

Good point. If the refugees don't return (and they never do these days) then there will be a surplus of men, and male status will remain low.

And I suppose I neglected something else as well. Status is now trans-national. So, if migration is allowed to happen, Ukrainian men have to compete with German men too and won't get the same status bump.

A good metric is the wars in the balkans in the 90s. 2/3s of those who fled stayed and 1/3 returned home. It is likely the numbers will be similar for Ukrainians who fled west. For the several million ethnic Russians who have moved to Russia it is unlikely they will return.

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.

That's what the Russian government has been betting on long term. They plan to introduce a project called "Time of Heroes" to provide additional training for the veterans and "make them the new elite". The plan is to insert the veterans as educators, allow them to become government officials.

There was a project like this called "School of Governors" which initially aimed to create new cadre for leading the whole regions of Russia, which, IMO, wasn't successful because most of the participants of the school already had connections. It kind of legitimizes the governor positions of the people who graduated it but the participants were specifically handpicked to participate in the program. Kirienko was the organizer and from my understanding "Time of Heroes" is going to follow the same template.

So, in addition to the natural affinity towards the men in the uniform, the government is also planning to boost their attractiveness artificially via increasing their social status. I have reasons to doubt that the program will be successful due to the previous implementations being faulty, but in general I think you hit the nail on the head in this regard.

I am Russian, so I can theorize/speculate about Russia and I'm not that in tune with the trends in Ukraine. All that said, commenting on your thesis in general, outside of the objective measures taken to increase the fertility (like subsidies) and subjective status increase of men (a quick glance through the studies didn't produce anything conclusive about the attractiveness of the males in the uniform), I don't think we can definitively conclude that the conditions in Russia and Ukraine will be conducive to increasing fertility in general. The main reason, in my opinion, is the current cultural environment, which might act as a counterbalance to the conditions you describe. Short theses before I go back to work:

  • More and more over the years, liberalism has been a dominant trend amongst the most fertile population, especially amongst women. The liberal women see the participation in a war as a negative trait rather than the positive.
  • The main task of the government is to bring up the new generation in a patriotic way so that it can counteract the dominant liberal cultural trend among millenials and zoomers. I project this to be the generation alpha rather than zoomers, although I may be wrong. If I am right, it might be a little bit too late for the regime as it hinges on a whim of a single aging ruler.
  • The government has also been failing on the cultural front. They try to create the media which would be appealing to millenial and zoomer generations but they haven't succeeded yet. To an extent, the current media output is definitely not patriotic and is liberal adjacent in its values.
  • Russian liberals have been aggressively importing and adopting western culture war issues (e.g. feminism, trans rights, cancel culture).

More and more over the years, liberalism has been a dominant trend amongst the most fertile population, especially amongst women. The liberal women see the participation in a war as a negative trait rather than the positive. The main task of the government is to bring up the new generation in a patriotic way so that it can counteract the dominant liberal cultural trend among millenials and zoomers. I project this to be the generation alpha rather than zoomers, although I may be wrong. If I am right, it might be a little bit too late for the regime as it hinges on a whim of a single aging ruler. The government has also been failing on the cultural front. They try to create the media which would be appealing to millenial and zoomer generations but they haven't succeeded yet. To an extent, the current media output is definitely not patriotic and is liberal adjacent in its values. Russian liberals have been aggressively importing and adopting western culture war issues (e.g. feminism, trans rights, cancel culture).

That's interesting. From what you say, it seems like the Russian government has been trying to appeal to women, but totally failing. Instead they've created a narrative that appeals to (some of) men, the conservative trad patriotic men, including some of us in other countries (the ones who don't actually have to fight in the war anyway). I wonder what they'll do going forward? Would they be open to allowing immigration from the sort of men and trad-wife couples from overseas that want that sort of culture, or will they insist on being Slavic-only?

I haven't gotten the impression that immigration is restricted for overseas people in Russia all that much. Anti-immigration talk focuses on Middle Asia - cheap labor, Muslim, etc.

There are barriers that would deter a 1st world immigrant. You have to learn the language (less important for Middle Asian immigrants who aren't taking high-level jobs and have many of their own countrymen at the jobs they do take), and you'll have to go through conscription if you're a male 30 (27 until recently) and under. Again, conscription is likely less undesirable for someone already used to a hard life, if not desirable (being fed, clothed, roofed and given an express course in conversational Russian).

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars.

Doesn't it have to be a popular war? WW2 was "the greatest generation" and had a ton of propaganda to back them up. Other wars have been, uh, not so popular, and the stereotype is of soldier's partners cheating on them while they're away on deployment.

On top of that, WW2 is pretty unique in how it massively raised the relative status of men. First it killed and injured a lot of men, so it created a shortage of marriable men for women. Then it gave the veterans training, a war pension, and a GI bill to college, at a time when most people still didn't even finish high school. It was especially rare for women to go to college then, so the men had a higher status. And it was a time when children were less of a burden, and more of a help- you could take a child and put them to work doing household chores, light farm work, or taking care of younger children. I can see how a veteran who wanted kids then would be a nice catch for a young woman. Now... well, while he was off fighting, she was probably going to college and getting work experience, so now she earns more than him and has no interest in having kids.

Agree on all counts. I retract all my baby boom statements about Ukraine.

Maybe Russia.

Incidentally, I've never seen more pregnant Russian women in a single place as I've seen on the streets of Buenos Aires in 2023.

Do you know what women don't like? Losers. Losers, low status, poverty, lack of access to quality consumption, and crucially – personal risk. They just loathe giving birth to children of low-status losers (eg. meat wave pellets with no human rights that are Slavic combatants) in an economically degrading, sanctioned, fascist country fighting an unwinnable war, as the streets get filled with thuggish police, premodern immigrants (some of whom actively support ISIS) and plain deranged cripples. They'd rather flee.

I'd rather not speak as to the state and living conditions in Ukraine.

To be honest, I think women are sensible in this regard.

I've recently congratulated my former friend from the AFU, on account of the birth of his son. He thanked me, and asked whether I know how to get modafinil in Spain.

So it goes.

Losers, low status, poverty, lack of access to quality consumption

Nice post, but it is firmly estabished that in most countries wealth and fertility has inverse correlation except top few percent of wealth.

Most of men 'died in SMO' I read about in social media had children.

What are the Russian women doing in Buenos Aires?

Seeking a better passport.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/10/argentina-pregnant-russians-birth-tourism-crackdown

Immigrating with their boyfriends/husbands who are evading the draft. The same is happening in Canada, many European countries (especially Cyprus), Thailand.

Do you know what women don't like? Losers.

I present you the Parable of Henry.

I counter with the Susan Inequality Principle.

Fails to counter; that claims women care mostly about physical appearance, not that they don't like losers.

To put it bluntly, I do not feel like pandering to misogynistic copes of people like Aaronson, who imagine themselves "romanceless" or "nice guys" rather than unsettling, mentally unwell, pathetically unmanly and, yes, plain ugly nerds. He is a loser. But on the whole, less of a loser than a penniless drunk conscript who'll get his dick blown off by a Ukrainian suicide drone.

I can only congratulate him for making it to a safe environment and finding a woman who looks past those biological drawbacks and loves him for who he is: a high-IQ prosocial academic with a badly coordinated, potbellied body of a paranoid bullying victim attached.

I have a hard time with assigning the label “loser” to someone who has achieved Aaronson’s level of success in life, both professional and personal.

Sure, I can deadlift a lot more than he can, but I’m not a world-class expert on any significant field of research.

There are several strategies men can pursue to achieve status and/or success with women, and “uber successful nerd” can work. Not everyone needs to be well-rounded or “classically masculine” to succeed.

Hoe_math actually has a very good chart where he describes male attractiveness for women as two dimensional matrix. The "nice guy" axis is how much resources is the guy willing to provide the "bad boy" axis is about physical attractiveness, assertiveness, dominance and confidence.

If you are ugly nerd like Aaronson, then you either literally not a person to any random woman, or if you attract attention by some lame attempt at niceness such as holding the door then you will only creep them out. It will take some grand gesture of generosity - such as a nice gift or some such - in order for a woman to suppress her disgust and keep you around in eternal friend zone. Also women do not give a shit about "success" such as solving Rubik's cube or winning MtG competition. Math and science is of similar significance. Women of course care about success such as athletic prowess, ability to exert one's will over other people such as being top salesman or politician and so forth. What matters is status, money, power and respect of other manly men and envy of other women. Math and science is good only in as much as it translates to these things. Grigori Perlman may be the most accomplished and important mathematician alive, but to any normal woman he is is nonexistent.

In a sense nerds like Aaronson are even more lame and pathetic as they feel their general niceness is supposed to humanize them in eyes of women. What they actually express is incredible lack of social awareness that they do not even understand their own deficiency and instead of being quiet in the corner and contemplating strategies of how to make themselves, they dare to creep them out. That is what I think @DaseindustriesLtd talks about.

That's a bit too strongly put. Life isn't all high school where jocks rule supreme; you can get away with achievement in obscure fields, adult women can appreciate you being a respected academic. That's part of what people seek (and find) in academia, actually.

No, my beef with Aaronson stems precisely from him having never left high school. From his generalized anxiety that got perfectly exposed in the Airport Episode, and his kvetching about Trumpian Jackbooted Thugs who'd have come for his family, and his indignation at anyone who finds his reactions excessive. He's not merely an unattractive "nice guy" in the toxic manosphere sense, he acts literally like a neurotic woman who's also an autist with a squeaky voice; and real women – in aggregate – are correct to not want him no matter how you slice it. But his wife is a fellow STEM nerd who doesn't mind it, and they are apparently good for each other. Whatever.

Yes, people should play to their strengths, and it sure has worked out well for him. So now he can feel himself being a persecuted loser nerd who'll surely get crushed by jackbooted thugs one day, while he's a successful academic with a healthy family and significant following, insulated from most any threat in life.

In my opinion, this posture of his is more pathetic than that of actual uncontroversial losers, and in the dating market it'd have been rightly penalized (separately from his appearance).

Regardless, this dispute itself is pathetic wading through someone else's high school traumas. Low-class Russians getting conscripted are not like Aaronson, nor are they like Henry the Slayer from Scott's fable. They are losers on every dimension sans perhaps tactical operational. Unfortunately it seems like I have to disambiguate. Aaronsons of the world, at the peak of their sexual frustration, often tell themselves that women love Henrys, implying that there is some correspondence between losing at conventional milestones of being a full-fledged adult, masculinity, and popularity with the opposite sex. And oppositely, nerds can feel their loss diminish – dumdum broads chasing Chad Thundercock, who cares! – and their success become more substantial, by contrasting it to the animalistic condition of an imagined Henry. Hence the whole of PUA/Redpill doctrine. This is cope. Women love men, not dysfunctional deadbeats. Some deadbeats happen to be manly, or at least more manly than Aaronson, which is not a high bar to clear; but ceteris paribus, women prefer men who are also conventionally successful, powerful and respected. This is very trivial. Nerd-Tate discourse is confused and fueled by resentment.

Transient details (like the fact that high-IQ, often autistic nerds who go to places like MIT and stay virgins until graduation have been economically well rewarded over the last few decades, and so can be considered "winners" despite low initial success with women) do not change much in the overall picture.

It's a common mistake, but "misogynistic" does not mean "someone women do not like".

Presumably "Henry," to the extent that he's even a real person, was some sort of gang leader. So he had real social cachet among a certain sort of young person, especially the gangbanger young women where a lot of the men are in prison. A middle class office worker might have more money, but hed never meet those wonen and he'd have no gang of followers to impress them with.

Was Henry actually a loser, or was he a winner who happened to treat his women badly?

By any standard but a circular one (that is, he was popular with women therefore not a loser), I think he was a loser. I mean, he's in and out of jail and/or psych hospitals.

It is extremely plausible that he was high status relative to the women he managed to pull and not a loser. He might be experienced in a job that looks past minor crimes and dating underclass teenagers- a scenario I’ve seen more than once- for example.

Yeah, Henry is about as much of a loser as you can get based on what our society ostensibly says it values. And yet he was able to get plenty of women.

There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.

Interesting. Definitely less pronounced but still very much a boom. Any thoughts on why?

The baby boom really defies easy explanations. In many countries it didn't even really peak with the immediate post-WW2 period but around the late 1960s - the UK, for example.. "A combination of sustained economic growth, hopeful prospects for the future and a strong family-based culture" would probably be the best explanation, since all of those are cultural trends that would cover all of (Western, perhaps in some ways even Eastern) Europe at this time - around the 70s you really start getting the fear of nuclear war and environmental crisis, societal atomization, and the waning of immediate post-war growth period in.

Yeah, it might be that rising expectations (off a low baseline from the Great Depression and WWII) could explain part of the boom in Western countries.

The baby boom is pretty well explained- working and middle class male incomes skyrocketed after the war at the expense of upper end incomes, and the best way for women to get in on this was marriage, which then leads to babies because within-marriage fertility rates are universally much higher than a society’s general fertility rate. Sexism was absolutely a load bearing part of this and a shrinking income gap was part of what ended it.

Making up for lost time and brighter expectations of the future I'd imagine.

It's not like the war period was good to Sweden or free of stress and worry, Sweden was both economically depressed and cut off from much trade. It was the post war period with intact industry and great demand for both raw materials and goods that was good.

All status isn't relative to the people around you at a given moment but also to what people have previously experienced. If tides are rising quickly then almost everyone is going to be perceived as higher status than before.

This is something like the third time someone has said something on this site that has made me want to link a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound only to find it's not on youtube...

They did a sketch called Switzerland During the War Years or something and it's a faux-documentary about the hardships experienced by Switzerland during the war. Someone complaining about the horror of running out of space in the attic for looted treasure received from trading with Germany. You get the idea.

Not sure how fair an assessment that is, but that's comedy for you.

Or how Finnish TV put it in 90s.

Everything is relative of course but there was rationing in Sweden during the war, even for basic things like food.

I wonder if that was actually good economic policy, or if it was one of those things that sounded good but actually made things worse for everyone, like price controls.

If there's not enough food coming to your country due to external factors then you basically have to ration food or you start getting starvation and mass deaths.

Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.

Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.

I can't speak about Switzerland but while Sweden was officially neutral it was far from unaffected - the Nazis were very interested in the country's natural resources and there there was also a lot of Nazi transit through Sweden between Germany and Norway.

There's also the fact that sharing a continent with countries that overwhelmingly were actively involved in the conflict means you probably get swept along in whatever cultural changes the rest of them experience.

Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.

As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US.

Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia. Europe really needs to get off its ass and start arming the Ukrainians properly (it's understandable why the US doesn't seem to care, but Europe doesn't have the same luxury of distance). Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.

Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.

This is the one thing Europe will never, ever do.

Well then their hand will have to be forced into it and I can't think of a better force at the moment than the threat of annihilation and subjugation by the Russian bear.

Europe took the "peace dividend" at the end of the cold war and spent it on welfare rather than using it to cut taxes to the levels they were at before WWII, now that dividend is going away and the only place to get this money back is to slash welfare to the levels it was at many decades ago.

France and Britain have H-bombs, why would they fear Russia? It's idiotic to wage a proxy war against your natural energy supplier, they only do it because the US is dragging them along (and not inconsiderable Euro brainrot).

Why would Russia invade NATO countries and risk nuclear war? Risk-benefit doesn't stack up.

I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.

You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.

If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.

From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.

I mean, we could also very marginally raise taxes and perhaps debt levels.

I know Italy doesn’t really have room to raise debt levels; does Northern Europe?

In the Nordics we could raise our debt to gdp by 100 percentage points and we'd still not be as indebted as Italy.

Europe could easily bear more debt, I just don't think it's really needed.

Arm them with what? Europe is a bunch of demilitarized vassals who popped their monocles and scoffed a few years ago when Trump told them to meet their 2% NATO commitment. It's not a video game, they can't magically turn GDP into missiles instantly.

Ukraine was cooked the moment it became clear their last counteroffensive wasn't going anywhere. China is going to go for Taiwan at some point this decade, and the US doesn't want to squander its air defense munitions in a forever war. Otherwise they'd have found a way to arm-twist or otherwise persuade the House GOP holdouts by now.

Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending

What do you mean by "easily"? I suppose the money is there, but Europe's entire political formula rests on the welfare state. Which nations want to upend this?

Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia.

Does it? Does it really? I'm not sure I'd choose being extirpated from the land of my birth and replaced wholesale by a hostile and alien culture, over being conquered and turned into a vassal state by a co-ethnic I share a thousand years of history with.

I mean, it's like asking me, a 90% British American with roots back to the founding of the the country, if I would rather America be flooded by Africans to the point where white people have been virtually extinguished, or a resurgent British Empire reconquer the USA.

I'd pick this baffling to imagine resurgent British Empire 101 times out of 100. Offers more hope for my descendants than genocide.

A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...

Russia will probably not treat Ukraine particularly well in victory, certainly much worse than Britain would treat us.

A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...

While the USA will likely be minority white in our lifetimes, South African demographics are simply not in the cards. I honestly thought my grandfather was the only person who worried about the US being majority black.

South African demographics are simply not in the cards

I don't see why not. The neoliberal solution to 3rd world poverty seems to be to import literally the entire 3rd world. 10 years ago it was only crazy right wingers that thought, or at least spoke the hate-fact, that America would be minority white in our lifetime. The respectable anti-racist who set the narrative claimed that was a "conspiracy theory". A mere decade later I'm supposed to believe "South African demographics are simply not in the cards." after all the lying and gaslighting I've already been subjected to?

You think America is going to be a single digit percent white? Or 80+% black?

If America’s population tripled entirely with sub Saharan migrants(and this is unlikely), we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today. If America maintains its current trajectory we’ll be white plurality but minority for a long time, but without any increase in the black population.

we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today

I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".

Tripling the population with sub Saharan Africans is a fantastical pie in the sky scenario that won’t happen and was intended to illustrate just how mathematically implausible South African demographics in the USA are.

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America be flooded by Africans

My dude, what the heck are you talking about? The top countries of origin for immigrants were Mexico (24 percent of immigrants), India (6 percent), China (5 percent), the Philippines (4.5 percent), and El Salvador (3 percent). So El Salvador sent more immigrants to the US than any nation in Africa. Concern about the US being flooded by Hispanics would at least be grounded in reality, although most indicators show them following a similar path that the Irish went through.

Perhaps they're referring to one of the oldest immigrations, i.e., the slave trade?

Whites were never under threat of being virtually extinguished in the US in the 1600s - 1800s.

I think the Irish would very optimistic. More likely criminality is reduced but they are a lower achieving social class that doesn’t contribute anything to national greatness and probably favor more social policies.

Nowhere near as bad as what Europe is facing but manageable.

By baby boom I meant fertility rate will increase.

Low bar when it's already in the gutter and has been for years.

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US

Nonsense. Wokeness and high immigration is not enforced top-down by the US, it's a decision that each nation makes independently. Japan has been under more intense US occupation than any other country, yet it's far less woke than most of Europe.

Has it? Americans understand Japanese culture far less than any European one, and conventional wisdom says that by V-J day the cold war was already going full steam ahead, so the Americans largely decided to leave the system that at least was manifestly not communist alone, rather than trying to impose some sweeping changes, fat-fingering them and risking another North Korea or China.

It also applies to South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If there are any nations one would consider woke in the Pacific, it would be Australia and New Zealand. Wokeness is a Western mindbug, not an American one.

Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.

But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.

the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

To what does this refer? It seems to me that the Ukrainians are no more eager for a negotiated settlement than the U.S. is. Now, it might be in their national interests to negotiate a peace, but they still have to want it to go down that route.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper

The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502

“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/

Yet according to Ukrainska Pravda (a pro-Western newspaper in Ukraine) pledging support wasn’t the only reason for Johnson’s visit. “Sources close to Zelenskyy” told the newspaper that Johnson was an “obstacle” to peace talks because he’d brought “two simple messages”.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”

Fast forward to August, and an article in Foreign Affairs by the self-described Russia hawk Fiona Hill claims that April’s talks did yield a “tentative” agreement:

According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.

In the end, of course, no such agreement was reached. But the timing suggests it was Johnson’s visit that scuppered the talks.

Boris Johnson is the UK, not the US. The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors for a while now.

Also, encouraging war from one head of government is very different from "not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace". Total motte and bailey here.

I haven’t seen anything specific but based on Biden not sending more equipment it seems true. They will blame the GOP for not passing bills but supposedly he’s had plenty of authorization.

Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.

For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-

The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).

-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-

Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.

In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.

Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.

Now, there might also be the minor factor that the negotiations in March and April coincided with the discovery and spread of awareness of the Bucha Massacre following the Russian retreat from Kyiv, which might have shaped Ukrainian perception on the trustworthiness of the Russians to bide by a deal and willingness of the public to accept.

Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.

But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.

The history will do so iff the GAE wins, which it without a doubt will, because it is invincible, from now and to the end of the human history. I hope I won't wake up tomorrow.

GAE

This acronym is impossible to take seriously. It's like if the dissident right came up with some acronym that spelled HOMO, then told you to "fear the HOMO".

While not strictly an acronym, this already exists as the short form of "global homogeneity/homogenization". It is used in the same way for the same reasons.

US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

This was the UK, not the US. And by UK, it was really just Boris Johnson, and it's not like he was strong arming them to prevent them from making peace, but rather encouraging them to stay in the fight. It still looks bad in hindsight, but there's a large gulf between one head of state saying essentially "hey you guys can do this and we'll help you" vs the implied notion of forcing them into a voluntary conflict.

The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors since at least November 2022.

I don’t think peace was ever on the table unless it meant return to pure vassal state. And Ukraine stays poor. Poland very well may be the strongest country in Europe in our lifetime. That’s a tough trade to do when you see how well being a real people like the Polish is.

the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

US hyperagency/rest of world hypoagency is not just for left wingers it seems.

t will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.

No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.

You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.

My uneducated question to all this is - dude, why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now? That's like China absorbing North Korea, isn't it? How is this not a net loss for Russia? They spend a bunch of money, catch a bunch of sanctions, kill a lot of people, and get a crappy broken country when they inevitably win.

Because much of Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian. They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya. The Eastern half of Ukraine is particularly Russian and there are considerable nationalist feelings within Russia about their co-Russians - which prompted the initial civil war in 2014. Strelkov and his band showed up and joined with locals to fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk, now annexed. Strelkov is not the biggest Putin supporter in the world, he was imprisoned by the authorities. There's grassroots nationalist feeling in Russia that Putin has to respond to - formerly by suppression and now by encouragement.

The western part of Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian and can't be considered Russian. They hate Russians for a bunch of reasons, including the Holodomor. They sought to celebrate Stephen Bandera as a founding father. The Russians (and Poles) consider him a genocidal war criminal. The new 2014 regime sought to restrict the Russian language and Ukrainize the population, prompting the unrest in the east of Ukraine. Russia does not want a Russia-hating state ruling over large number of Russians right next door, aligned with the West.

Furthermore, the Eastern half of Ukraine is fairly industrialized. In the Soviet era it was supposed to be interoperable with the rest of the military industrial complex, engines for Russian helicopter gunships were made there amongst other things. There's lots of mines, coal and factories, the west is more agricultural. Eastern Ukraine also is the gateway to Crimea which is the most Russian part of Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine controls water and power supplies to the quasi-island. The land bridge and Mariupol region Russia took back in 2022 is key to holding Crimea, also a major naval base.

They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya.

"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.

Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.

There are some born-in-Russia Russians actively fighting against Russia, that doesn't mean they're not Russian. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian army is Russian! There are also many Ukrainians (in the geographic sense) fighting against Ukraine. This conflict has dynamics of both a civil and interstate war, identity is complicated.

Those who fled to Finland would logically be anti-Russian. The Ukrainians who fled to Russia would presumably be the opposite.

Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.

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If you want to steelman it you would probably say Russia is thinking in centuries. Break Ukraine today and permenently put them in their sphere of influence. Then population rebounds and Ukraine maintains its historical place in the greater Slavic empire.

Of course that works in the 12th century but the world today feels less and less like land etc is going to matter.

Russia is thinking in centuries.

That backfired horribly then, since the invasion turned the UA-RU relationship from something that resembled the USA and Canada, to something that resembles RU vs Poland. The Russians might get the land in the end, but they've lost the Ukrainians themselves who were mostly loyal during the USSR. The best Russia can really hope for now is that Ukrainians take a "slavery is better than death" attitude, but that hardly makes for a strong empire.

Sure for 50 years. I was trying to steelman. In 150 years it’s back to Canada and US in the view from Moscow.

If North Korea was cozying up to an alliance created for the sole purpose of keeping China in check then China just might feel the need to not let a border state join that alliance, costly as that may be.

The rational thing for Russia to do would be to not invade Ukraine, but for regime-legitimacy reasons they’re kinda committed to winning the war.

why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now?

First, their gas and oil pipes to Central Europe go through Ukraine. This is both bad for security and for financial reasons. Second, Russia has wanted a warm sea port for approximately the entirety of their existence. Third, Ukraine and Belarus form something of a wall to defend against NATO. Yes, Putin feels very threatened by NATO. I realize that might sound absurd on a mostly western-centric forum. If you're curious about Putin's perspective, here's a great video going over his life and beliefs.

TL;DR: He's actually very easy to understand, all he wants is a stable and safe Russia that is slightly better tomorrow than it was yesterday. He was mildly pro-US before Bush ruined everything. Nowadays, he sees the US as hypocrites telling him to stop his imperialism while acting in a very imperialist way themselves. And in the case of Ukraine, it was a Russian puppet just like Belarus until a violent uprising toppled the government. Putin saw this as proof of the US and NATO meddling with what he considers to be the Russian sphere of influence.

Here's more context for the current situation, if you want it.

Russia believes that Ukraine is a core interest, and NATO encroaching on Ukraine violated their security. Even if the war is a net loss (a debatable question), they model it as a smaller loss than Ukraine joining NATO (de facto or outright).

I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?

Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.

Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.

Have you ever interacted with russian citizens outside the moscow and st. petersburg elite? They are poor as shit. Russia is a 3rd world country, this whole war has been an embarrassment. They can't even take over the poorest country in europe.

Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.

It was mocked as a gas station with nukes. Nobody ever said Russia couldn't be dangerous if it wanted to.

My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.

Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.

Alas.

"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".

Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,

"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."

Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.

More comments

We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide.

That's not how it happened. The west originally assumed that Ukraine would be conquered in three days. It was only after the Ukrainians themselves demonstrated their will to fight against Russia (and their success doing so) that NATO et al started arming Ukraine.

America is not the only country in the world with agency.

Biden has been enlisting the Kennedy family to disavow one of their own and prop up himself as the ultimate and only possible candidate for Democrats recently, to the point where Bobby Jr.’s own brother has rejected him and has said on record that he will to the best of his ability attempt to persuade his sibling to drop out of the race. This does seem pretty harsh, especially with Biden saying he will to the best of his ability attempt to attain Bobby Sr.’s dreams in his continued Presidency—essentially a shot at Bobby Jr.—given the fact that not only does the President of the United States not believe that Bobby Jr. can fulfill his own father’s hopes, but the entire Kennedy family doesn’t, and rather they believe a probable dementia-sufferer has a safer chance of doing that.

It does seem to me that Bobby Jr. might be the last one in the family to at least hope for a fulfillment of Camelot, given the rejection of such a concept by the rest of the family, to the point where King Arthur has been succeeded by the court fool after all these years of the seat being vacant. Biden as coming from the same stock (Black Irish “Catholic”) and the same era is basically an imposter adopted by the Kennedy’s, yet they would rather have him instead of their own flesh-and-blood, given their total allegiance to the modern Democratic Party (which Biden probably doesn’t really understand himself, given the fact that he, along with all the other Kennedy’s of old, would have had a probable heart attack if they were able to see where everything else is now back then—even with all of Jack Kennedy’s lapsed Catholicism and infidelity, I doubt he would have been such a phony to host pride parades at the White House).

Which raises the question: what was the ultimate act of treachery by Bobby Jr.? There’s a lot of possibilities, and as far as I know he’s the only one in the family to doubt the government-approved stories of how his family members were killed, and as Bobby Jr. would probably pardon Sirhan Sirhan (and maybe Oswald) if he ever wins, that would probably be a huge instance of disrespect in their eyes.

It's really not that complicated - they agree with the Democratic Party and think their anti-vaccine kook of a brother/uncle/etc. would be a terrible choice to be President?

Feels like the ultimate act of treachery is obvious. Possibly being a spoiler candidate and allowing Trump to beat Biden. If that ended up happening he and his entire family probably never hears the end of it and may never get a seat at the Dem table again.

Bobby at least would be banished to the Kennedy kids' table at every Thanksgiving from here to eternity...

AFAICT, the modern democrats and their elite backers- the Kennedies very much included- really value having a team player(translation, not RFK jr) in command at the top, and prefer the predictable lower middling performance of an incompetent team player over having a wild card like Trump or RFK.

I mean let's be real here, RFK also can't win. But democrats are the party of status-quo predictability, managed decline included if necessary, and republicans are the party of out of left field high variance ideas. RFK might be on the left, but he's also definitely a supporter of variance ideas.

democrats are the party of status-quo predictability, managed decline included if necessary, and republicans are the party of out of left field high variance ideas

Strong disagree. The past 60 years have been Dems instituting sudden breaks with the past, and the Repubs begging for a chance to slow down and catch their breath.

I mean, can you predict what Dems will platform next, denial of which will be a fireable offense in 2030?

I mean, can you predict what Dems will platform next, denial of which will be a fireable offense in 2030?

Regulations for AI/automation. Maybe not as a "core" platform, but getting at least as much attention as student loan forgiveness has since ~2020.

Support for that seems broadly bipartisan.

I mean, can you predict what Dems will platform next, denial of which will be a fireable offense in 2030?

After the trans thing? They'll continue to advocate for diminishing parental rights. Instead having the state/school be the ultimate authority in how your children are raised.

Maybe he's just viewed as the crazy uncle you tell the kids not to talk to? Every family already has that guy and it's hardly a stretch that a family as sprawling as the Kennedys would have bad apples the batch prefer isolated. They did lobotomize one of their own after all.

Right, but the mode in which he was regarded as the ‘crazy uncle’ was through… distrusting the government that ~ 80% of the country believes killed his family as well as wanting to recreate an idealistic version of the governance his family had when at the peak of their power in modern America, which the family has decisively rejected as a fantasy (even though JFK’s whole thing was this fantasy being possible through effort, ‘not that it’s easy, but because it’s hard’, etc.)

The entire family seems to have abandoned this desire and rejected their predecessors’ skepticism towards the institutions of this country (especially in intelligence) and traded it off for simply being a name to aim to have on your donation lists. It’s a shame.

I would imagine it as reversion to the mean, where most of the Kennedys regressed to mediocre politicos with no special ambitions or purpose. Denouncing Bobby and endorsing Biden is very rational if you're "normal" in many senses of that word.

When someone/thing with that sort of power kills a family member you got to be a little bit crazy to not fall in line and just accept whatever they get payed for the endorsements though.

True, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they drank the Kool-Aid so hard that they don’t actually think their lives are in danger; the Kennedy’s just accept the standard stories (because it’s ‘the Science’ TM), so that they become their own perfect self-propagandizers. Basically just a perfect showing of the capturing of American aristocracy for the purpose of the empire above all else. You won’t even need to be afraid!

Biden has been enlisting the Kennedy family to disavow one of their own and prop up himself as the ultimate and only possible candidate for Democrats recently, to the point where Bobby Jr.’s own brother has rejected him and has said on record that he will to the best of his ability attempt to persuade his sibling to drop out of the race.

...Why is this news?

Family ties aren't all that strong anywhere, and they certainly aren't that strong in any political dynasty anywhere on either side of the aisle. RFK Jr. is a pretty fringe dude, he has a roughly zero percent chance of actually winning the presidency, and a much higher percent chance of acting as a spoiler against the Democrats.

There is no concievable world where his own family don't prefer Biden to him.

Also, how does "black irish" apply to either biden or the kennedy family?

Family ties aren't all that strong anywhere

This would be news in any country outside the WEIRD west, where family ties tend to be a lot stronger than political ideologies!

I think it's still true everywhere but in cities even in the WEIRD west.

Once you enter the halls of power family ties are, pfft. So much smoke and mirrors. This is not a modern or simply European phenomenon either. History is replete with brothers killing brothers over power. Just to rattle some off from a cursory google search, there was Edward and George Plantagenet, Garcia and Ferdinand Sánchez, the amusingly named War of the Three Sanchos, Atahualpa and Huascar Capac, Harold and Tostig Godwinson, the Xuanwu Gate Incident, Gao Yan and Gao Yin, Gao Zhan and Gao Bainian, really just the whole history of Chinese Imperial Families is just endless repetition of "and then he ordered the deaths of his brothers, nephews, cousins, and their entire families", Cambyses and Smerdis, Caracalla and Geta, hell Mehmed II actually legalized royal fratricide in the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed III killed nineteen of his brothers. Shah Jahan had his eldest brother Khusrau Mirza killed, Ashoka the Great killed all of his brothers, Shaka Zulu (yes that Shaka) was killed by two of his brothers, etc. etc.

Endorsing another candidate instead of simply murdering your brother is practically a warm and loving embrace.

I have a meta question about the study of group differences and don't know anywhere else to ask it.

If the claim "group A is on average different to group B on X measure" receives the response "But that difference actually disappears when you control for C variable, so the cause of the difference is not inherent, it must be C that causes it"

If controlling for something causes the average difference to disappear, would this not simply be selecting for individuals within both groups who have similar genes which cause them to be more similar? This seems like you're not not comparing the entirety of group A to the entirety of group B, but you're just comparing a subgroup of group A to a subgroup of group B - when the original claim was that the entire groups differ in the average. This seems like a fallacy.

Can you give us an example of this? I am curious to dig into a simulation where controls are impossible.

IQ and socioeconomic status is what I had in mind

E.g. USA blacks and whites have same IQs after you "control" jointly for individual's income, education, marital status (and other factors which are downstream of IQs)

or, jokingly, controlling for lattitidue, Texas and Alaska have same climate.

Those seem like backronyms rather than inseparable conditions with no directional causation.

what do you mean?

I think this paper is what you are looking for.

Sociologist's fallacy

Israel / Iran War Back On?

Rumors are swirling that Israel will attack Iran as early as today. Iran has promised to retaliate if they do.

Why would Israel do this? Some conjectures:

  1. Iran's missile and drone attack was so pathetic that Israel feels it can attack with little fear of retaliation

  2. The reaction to Iran's attack shows that Sunnis won't help Iran

  3. An outside chance of regime change in Iran might be worth it. Israel has gradually improved relations with Sunni neighbors such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. However, Iran's proxy fights have been a constant thorn in their side. A regime change in Iran could finally bring true peace to Israel.

  4. If they can set back Iran's nuclear program it will be worth it

One big wild card is of course the U.S. reaction. Biden is in the middle of a difficult re-election campaign where inflation is probably the #1 issue. Petrol prices have been a major obsession with the Biden administration, which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).

Israel's attack could cause a spike in oil prices and threaten Biden's reelection campaign. Having already drained about half the SPR to help win the 2022 midterm elections, there is less flexibility to supress prices this time around. For this reason, Biden has urged restraint. But when the chips are down, I think everyone knows that Israel will have the administration's full support.

Less certain is the reaction of European countries and Muslim neighbors. Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?

Because I was called out for being too late with my nothingburger prediction before I'll make sure to get it in early this time around.

Nowhere. In. Two. Weeks.

Nothingburger predictions work most of the time. But when they're wrong, they can be very wrong. That's why there's no alpha in making them. In terms of options trading, it's called picking up pennies in front of steamrollers.

(But yeah, you're probably right).

Nothingburger predictions are why I didn't believe the western intelligence community's claim that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. You can find similar claims of imminent invasion going all the way back to the annexation of Crimea, with nothing to show for it. The intelligence community has successfully predicted 8 of the last 1 Russian invasions.

Can you show evidence that the US IC warned of a Russian invasion where nothing happened?

Sometimes, warnings being deemed legit depends on the threat actor actually following through. Putin could have backed off at the last moment. People like you would then call the warnings fake news, but the intent and preparation and potential was there.

In fact, that was the goal of the US: share enough (unprecedented) intel that Putin would decide to change his mind. If US foreign policy had been more successful, you would call that an intel failure, when actually it would be about the most successful intelligence can be.

As a specific nothingburger prediction, Israel will do something Iran can respond to with a typical Hezbollah-launched and ineffectual strike, Israel will blow up some building in Beirut, and they'll call it even.

Notably absent among your conjectures 1-4 is deterrent to future attacks. That is the obvious top of the stack.

I think you're right, but it's not super obvious to most people. I'll spell it out to save people time.

Let's say both sides are equal. In that case, "deterrent to future attacks" is equivalent to "tit for tat forever". This obviously doesn't work.

However, since Israel is much stronger than Iran, deterrence actually works since they can impose costs on Iran which Iran can't impose in return. I'll assume this is what you meant.

Let's say both sides are equal. In that case, "deterrent to future attacks" is equivalent to "tit for tat forever". This obviously doesn't work.

Doesn't work compared to what? I would rather have intermittent tit for tat forever than constant tit for tit forever, which is the salient alternative. Deterrence is not about being stronger than your attacker; it is about making it persistently, conspicuously not-worthwhile for him to victimize you. That is how it works in prison, for example. Either you fight periodically, win or lose, or your horizons get broadened in a really interesting way.

I don't know. Is a full blown war between Iran and Israel even possible? Does either nation have the capability to deploy and maintain a substantial force on the ground of the other, or is the worst that can happen a full air exchange?

I don't know. Is a full blown war between Iran and Israel even possible? Does either nation have the capability to deploy and maintain a substantial force on the ground of the other,

No. Not even close.

or is the worst that can happen a full air exchange?

Yes. Iran's max damage is probably 10k Israeli civilians.

Israeli could do a lot worse. They could probably kill Iran's leaders and cripple their oil infrastructure. At the far extreme they could nuke Tehran but obviously they won't do that for game theoretical reasons.

Israel’s Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said that “the strike will be met with a response”. The question is, will Israel’s response be a substantial escalation, or will this turn into an international slap fight?

I would assume that a slap from Israel can be far weaker, and yet far more painful, because Iran is not well known for its anti-rocket defense systems. Would that still count as escalation? Depends on who you ask.

Maybe it'll happen this time. Maybe the next time. Israel is capable of successfully prosecuting a war against Iran without American assistance or approval, and the logic of the situation in the region makes such a war nigh inevitable (unless the Iranian regime goes down otherwise).

As I've said a year and a half ago:

Right now Israel is preparing for war. Washington is making somewhat noncommittal noises, but the truth is, it's just unable to do more than postpone the decision, drag their feet with demanded supplies. And if they tarry too much, it will be self-defeating. Israel is resourceful, they will make do with tools it has or can produce or procure by other ways – only further decoupling. All those complaints about $3 billion that right-wingers like to air – they're no doubt annoying to Israelis, and will be thrown back in American faces when this annoyance (and the political benefit of bringing it up) outweighs the utility of that chump change.

It's a popular conceit on the far right that the US will one day grow out of the «Greatest Ally» narrative. What is not considered is that Israel is straight up a politically stronger, more agentic and more serious country, and can pull the plug from their own side.

Some random Russian economics and history channel comes to mind:

How "unexpected"💁🏻‍♂️

👉🏻"U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a conversation with his Israeli counterpart Yov Galant, expressed displeasure that Washington was not warned about Israel's plans to attack the Iranian "consulate" in Damascus. This was reported by The Washington Post. The claims were made during a telephone conversation on April 3 (a day after the attack). Informed sources told the WP editorial board that Austin and other senior U.S. defense officials believe Israel should have warned Washington about the attack."

🤷🏻‍♂️That's curious, why should Israel report on its actions to pathological liars and traitors? So they can pass all the information to the enemy?

The US reputation continues to punch through the bottom - and that's actually a good thing rather than bad. No one should depend on their internal intrigues and problems anymore.

The author is Catholic, but I get the impression – from many distinct sources – that even mildly Zionist Jews are inclined to agree.

Americans are truly delusional if they believe that their clients – be those Ukrainians or Jews – feel any loyalty to them just because of past help, or can be blackmailed with talks about some common Western cause or principles or interests. They're going to do what they find useful, at occasions they deem opportune.

The US aren’t “pathological liars and traitors”, they just put their interests first. The Israelis didn’t tell Austin about the consulate attack because (as the telegram channel correctly says) there was a good chance they’d tell the Iranians to “preserve stability” and “avoid escalation”. But all major powers have these considerations, look at the way the Russians screwed the Armenians over again recently, for example. There are even things the British and Canadians don’t share with the US. Only Germany and possibly Australia are really pure vassals.

Huh? I don't endorse the author's evaluation, as I do not believe Israel is entitled to even greater American support. Protesting American displeasure is pure arrogance on Israeli part.

Ukrainians and Israelis both are capable of adapting to a world without US support, that they received US support is because it is in the US interest to keep the conflicts within a narrow bound.

Most obviously, the cheap drones being lobbed smugly by vatniks and jihadis can be replicated with miminal effort by even a semi functional state. With no external support at all, nothing is stopping Ukrainians from kitbashing a kamikaze drone from shit ordered off aliexpress and an arduiono with the midterm output of a computer vision junior and slamming them into Russian oil refineries. Similarly, Israel is already conducting cross border kinetic actions that destabilize US intererts - Eliat is hardly an important port and if the Red Sea chokes why does Israel care about that more than Tel Aviv.

No, the US support is ultimately a bribe to keep spillover effects, not a show of solidarity. Ukraine and Israel and even Taiwan are not mountain locked Kurds or Panjshir Afghans, these state actors have their own capabilities and dangers that can threaten second order US interests with far greater consequence than what we see now.

Ukrainians and Israelis both are capable of adapting to a world without US support, that they received US support is because it is in the US interest to keep the conflicts within a narrow bound.

Harsh disagree here. Ukraine is currently losing and has been for quite some time, despite the US' support - and at this point there's no support the US can give that would make a difference short of simply announcing that their side of the Dnieper is under the nuclear umbrella.

As for Israel, it would depend on how exactly "US support" gets defined. They'd easily be able to survive if the US simply cut off the free money, but Israel takes (in some cases, like intelligence, without asking) a lot more than that. If they were actually and seriously cut off from the West they'd be reliant on their nuclear program for deterrence - and that just isn't enough to protect them from their threat environment, especially seeing as how they've been pissing off Russia and China. They'd have to find a solution to the problem of the orthodox as well, and that's not going to be terribly easy for them.

I actually largely agree with your specific points, though the statements I made were to service a different argument. Don't get me wrong, I was hardly implying that the Ukrainians were winning or had a clear path to victory laid out before them. The Russian mistakes of 2022 have been largely corrected and Ukraine is set for a slow and inevitable defeat, as befits the poorest and most corrupt nation (stated in order to highlight the lack of state capacity not to denigrate the Ukrainians) in Europe going up against the Russian Armed Forces who out of sheer pride would - and have - endured humiliating loss ratios to eke out a path to victory. Similarly, my statement on Israel being able to live off the US teat merely shifts the existential burden more on Israeli shoulders, largely in line with all the points you raised.

No, I should be explicit in what I mean: US aid is not charity, or even soft power projection to hurt US enemies. US aid is there to keep dangerous dogs leashed and to keep them from making further disruptions. Unchecked, Ukraine may decide to go down swinging and in turn utterly destroy all manner of Europe bound infrastructure because hurting Russia is all that matters. Similarly Israel may give zero shits about the delicate balance of power in the mideast and take 'decisive' action against Iran, regsrdless of its implications to the Strait of Hormuz.

US allies aren't just recipients of US generosity, they wed themselves to continual compliance with the restrictions imposed from the top lest the tap shut. The converse also applies, if the tap shuts then the 'allies' become free to wreck shit.

I commend you for recognizing a rare piece of insight that many don't realize. Both the premise that a leash can be tugged from both ends, and that military aid is as much a means to regulate as to enable violence.

An example of almost certainly-not-sanctioned Ukrainian resistance to Russia was the Nordstream pipeline explosion, which on further investigation was very likely- and plausibly- a Ukrainian operation of considerably sparse means of not much more than a rental boat, some divers, and far-from-impossible to procure explosions. As a result, the entire German economic strategy was derailed as the strategic premise of Nordstream blew apart, every resistance group around the world gained a sudden interest in scuba certification, and Russia lost its monopoly on under-seas infrastructure violence that it had been trying to leverage until then. Every power in the region had reason enough to cover it and pay it no further mind, not least because the people who would have wanted to take issue with Ukraine for doing so couldn't stop it from happening again, and there ceased to be an economic case for breaking with NATO in favor of Russia when any of the people between Germany and Russia could blow up the business case of Russian energy.

Giant geopolitical and global economic implications, teensy little boat. And not something particularly seen sense, despite impressively deep Ukrainian special forces intrusions to strike deep within Russia.

Restraint can be a function of inability as much as unwillingness, and as much as renting a boat and finding some surplus explosives is relatively conceivable to us, the net frictional effort may be less efficient than remaining in the wests good books in exchange for artillery and A2AD. Specifics on why a mass special force terrorism campaign has not been seen yet is for armchair generals on NCD, since discussing operational or tactical or technical military matters here is generally lacking as actual subject matter experts are circumspect and blowhards are unrestrained.

More germane to the topic of discussion, the broadly philosophical 'why' of these wars, seem to be tinged with aspects of the culture war. I am suspicious of claims that one party is slave to the whims of another, especially if that 'other' is a stated proximate enemy. The real enemy after all are the cowardly democrats forcing Ukraine to fight innocent Russia who champions true hero of the anti-woke (Trump), or the real enemy are the LGBTQIA+ Harvard DEI consultants encouraging the ummah to strike back against the bastion of Western Colonialism. The vague stink of culture war obviously permeates anything, but Ukraine in particular seems to attract a specific strain of aggrieved 'peacenik' who cannot fathom at all why someone would fight back against an aggressor.

When these discussions do not pass the smell test, it certainly invites suspicion that the discussions are not going to be held in good faith. No amount of discussion, good faith or otherwise, will dissuade a party set in their opinion, and the discussions bog down into mutual whining. Its certainly can be fun and even enlightening by accident, but the core arguers are unlikely to budge.

I'm reminded of one of Scott A's old posts about internet arguments. Both sides feel like they've responded proportionally, just matching the insults of the other person to send a message that they're not a pushover. And both sides feel like the other side is escalating, ramping things up with a more aggressive response. I'm a little worried that might happen here... Iran says "we needed to send a message by responding to Israel's attack on our generals." Israel says, well that was us responding to your attacks on us, and now we have to respond to your attack by uh... bombing Tehran...?

From a game theory POV I would think you'd want to hit back much, much harder to discourage future retaliation in the first place?

And what happens when more than one party has this attitude? Wild mutual escalation that most people people involved don't even want. Turning what could have been a mild contention into effectively a blood fued.

I suppose this depends on being significantly stronger than the other party. Like, if you have nukes and the other does not.

Though that may throw you into a weird equilibrium where enemies don't attack unless they're certain of your total destruction. Ie. fine, fine, dead.

So that's the sort of thing you can only do if you have a reliable second-strike/dead-hand system. And even then you can get pushed into a situation where your opponent will be so pissed off they just eat the loss. It only works against causal decision theories.

Like the internet. There is a moderator involved. Israel can do as much as the US will tolerate. If they catch a ban (US decides to cut them off) then suddenly they probably can’t afford things like the Iron Dome especially in current warfare and even more drone attacks. It supposedly cost a billion dollars the other day and far less for Iran.

They can’t do things to the extent the US cuts them off and Iranian retaliation seems justified.

Like you, I expect an attack on nuclear facilities is possible.

Israel would be stupid (which is entirely possible given Bibi hanging on by a thread etc) to respond now unless they really thought they good meaningfully slow the nuclear program. In that case this would be the only opportunity to get away with it without the same level of international condemnation.

But Iran’s nuclear facilities are underground and well fortified, I don’t know that Israel could actually damage the program by that much.

If the nuclear facilities are out of reach, Iran's power generators are not and destroying all of them would significantly damage Iran's economy and hence its military capacity.

But Iran’s nuclear facilities are underground and well fortified, I don’t know that Israel could actually damage the program by that much.

I'm not sure either, but I'm also a big believer in the power of human ingenuity. Stuxnet certainly set a high bar for what Israeli is capable of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Not sure what kind of surveillance assets Israel has, but one possibility would be targeting people in high leverage positions within the nuclear program. Kill enough of them and people might reconsider the cost/benefit of working to build nukes.

Yes. Like their The Jackal style robot muder van that killed Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

File not found. Want to post a summary?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-killed-irans-top-nuke-scientist-with-remote-operated-machine-gun-nyt/

Israelis built a truck with a remote control gun on it and killed Iran's top nuclear scientist with it in Iran.

Ah, the old Walter White method. I've heard the Russians have some pretty tricky ways to kill people too. Surprised the Israelis haven't made a heart attack gun yet.

In any case, if Israeli can reduce the life expectancy of an average Iranian nuclear scientist to less than 10 years, I think that should do the trick. The rest should take care of itself. "What are we making nukes for anyway, Reza? You ever wonder what would happen if we just.. didn't".

Mossad's been gunning down Iranian researchers for ages - you are not proposing a new idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists

Great minds think alike I guess. Still, it's probably easier to kill some scientists when you have a green light to bomb as opposed to being sneaky.

Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?

Jordan allowed Israel to use its airspace to counter Iranian drones and shot some drones down itself. I'm not really sure how neutral that counts as, at this point.

Why would Israel do this? Some conjectures:

Iran's strike from its own territory appears to be, in my admittedly imperfect knowledge, rather unprecedented in the history of tit-for-tat strikes between the two countries. Historically, the strikes on Israel have come from Iranian proxies, not Iran itself. Even with the telegraphed nature of the 4/13-4/14 strikes (allegedly Iran told the US exactly what flight-paths the drones/missiles would be on?!?!?) Israel wouldn't want to let the precedent stand that Iran can launch on targets in Israel proper without Israel having grounds to strike at Iranian targets inside Iran in retaliation.

which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).

It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration. I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing the "remain in Mexico" policy (which seems linked to ongoing trouble with immigration), making nice with Iran (which didn't prevent October 7th, and seems hotter now than before), and passing the final round of pandemic stimulus (which we were told wouldn't cause inflation).

It doesn't exactly inspire the most confidence in me.

It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration. I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing...

Its similar to the "reversed stupidity is not intelligence." Biden just got into office and reflexively repealed a bunch of high profile Trump actions without seeming to engage in any thoughts about the merits and tradeoffs relating to any of those policies. So what you got was floods of new asylum claims, funding going to a bunch of terrorists, etc.

US foreign policy is schizophrenic. Why would anyone want to negotiate with the US at this point? Obama takes great pains to advance diplomacy with Iran and join the TPP - Trump immediately reneges on the nuclear deal and leaves the TPP - maximum pressure and trade wars! Biden wants to go back to Obama policies on Iran and climate. Why should anyone trust in his word when the next guy can negate it?

Trump wants to throw Ukraine under the bus. Well, fair enough. May as well get off the sinking ship in a lifeboat rather than swim in the cold. But it's still not consistent, it's confused and certainly does Zelensky no good.

US foreign policy is schizophrenic.... Why should anyone trust in his word when the next guy can negate it?

Because we are the 1000 lb gorilla. But more seriously, this is all caused by Presidents thinking they can make foreign policy solo. Wars are supposed to be declared by Congress. Treaties are supposed to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate. If Obama wanted to make a serious nuclear deal with Iran he should have gotten 2/3 of the senators on board, not done a deal he knew 54 senators were opposed to. This sort of unserious flipping happens when a President tries using foreign policy to secure victories on domestic policy.

The pro-migrant and internationalist left flank had not gotten fully humiliated by the migrant busses and Afghanistan yet, and that wing wanted their pound of flesh upfront.

That wing is still at the same place even after the've been "humiliated". They are incapable of that emotional state.

That wing however is capable of having its impotence exposed, and that has lead to their rantings being dismissed. Jayapal is no longer the force she used to be, and the Squad is little more than a punching bag for right wing shock jocks. They have no political cachet to demand more pounds of flesh up front, and their continual failures are as much due to republican successes as much as their own allies failing to back them up.

Uhh? Biden's whole Mid East policy is based on pandering to that wing. They have a lot of cachet.

My assessment stems from Jayapal getting smacked down for her October 2022 call for Ukraine to surrender, and how the new Israel ceasefire statement is made by Pogan instead of her. The CPC is the largest caucus, sure, but Biden seems to occasionally coincide with their priorities rather than wait on them. My main indicator is how neutered Jayapal specifically is despite her stated ambitions, and I will be happy to reevaluate my conclusions based on evidence of either Jayapals nonrelevance to the CPC or Jayapals wing being specifically catered to.

Jayapal is the chair of the CPC, but doesn't appear to reflect progressive consensus on Ukraine, which is that defeating Russia is super important.

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