domain:academic.oup.com
Hadad
30m ago
Yeah its why I said that American superiority doesn't matter. Seems that you should be not confident in American superiority. And yet you are. Ok.
America loves doomed interventions and military misadventures, but it loves them because it has such an overwhelming military and wealth advantage over everyone else it can afford to be reckless and half-ass imperialism.
No, it is not a senator's role to do logistics. Yes, it is a senators role to make informed choices on the people he wants to declare war on. Ted Cruz not knowing basic information about the country he wants to attack is an excellent indication that he is not making informed choices.
I reject that population size is an important factor when deciding to halt nuclear proliferation. It is the military and the President who will handle the logistics of destruction and/or conquest.
The fact that Ted Cruz could not answer those questions, that he didn't know there were large minority populations, is a damning indication that he did not consider that regime change very likely means civil war and refugee crisis.
What? No, of course it means those things. Why do you think Ted Cruz or people who support bombing Iran care about another civil war in the Middle East? So long as they're not nuclear, they're welcome to go full Mad Max.
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really.
Quite possibly this is true. Perhaps it will continue to be true for the rest of your life. What I observe from society at large, however, is deep discontent bordering on open rage at the sexual environment our society has delivered. Having attempted to have the bloom only, the bloom withers and is gone, and people generally are much worse off for it, and perceive themselves to be much worse off.
Meanwhile, I have a spouse, and children, and strong ties to a family of considerable size. Do you have these things? If you do not, how do you think that fact shapes the world over the next two or three decades?
Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
Then you and your preferences are irrelevant to the question of what the future will be. Coercion is an indispensable building-block for large-scale, high-complexity social order. To the extent that you disagree, it seems likely to me that you are either blind to the coercion you endorse and participate in, or else you are in a temporary pocket of calm created by the push and pull of competing ideological constructs. The tide goes in and out, and there's doubtless a moment there in the middle where it seems that the water is being neither pushed nor pulled, but it will not last. You will be found either by the coercion of Progressive ideology, or the coercion of people like me, or the coercion of some other construct, because atomic individualism creates a vast power vacuum, and sooner or later that vacuum will be filled.
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller life
(Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "The Wages of Sin is Death."
naraburns
nihil supernum
38m ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off.
This does not seem clear to me at all.
In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong.
He's a partisan. I trust his unguarded opinion about someone whose status was in the moment unimportant to his tribe, above anything he said later in public when he was likely to be speaking more to save face or engage in "yay ingroup." I'm applying something like a Bayesian version of the "statements against interest" rule, I guess.
As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question,
Sorry--looks like I dropped a word ("was") from that sentence, mea culpa. You are correct; she was asked "what is a woman" and her answer was "I'm not a biologist," which is a stupid answer even assuming she is a hardened partisan. Someone who believes "woman" means what trans advocates want it to mean ("a person who identifies as a woman"), should have answered in a way that would not imply that the answer was grounded in biology at all. Her answer wasn't just a pointless dodge, it was a bad dodge. If you think it would be more charitable to characterize her answer as a lie than as stupidity, like... okay? But that's not actually clear to me. (I also disagree that the question was a "gotcha." It's not a "gotcha" to ask someone a question that requires them to either admit to the force of biological reality, or speak lies and prevarications in service of one's ideological paymasters. But that is a different discussion I think.)
Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Two people can be idiots at the same time!
it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity
I am opposed (and increasingly opposed every passing year) to the deference shown the judiciary by lawyers, journalists, and the public. Specifically, you are probably familiar with attorneys being disciplined and sanctioned for impugning judicial integrity in court proceedings; I regard that as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. My experience with law practice and legal academia is that there is a prevalent attitude of deference to the judiciary, not only to its supposed impartiality, but to its competence. I think that is both mistaken and a little bit disgusting, especially as the judiciary has become increasingly professionalized. One does not "rise" to the rank of Supreme Court Justice, because these people are not above anyone. Especially when they are explicitly affirmative action selections. Even the brightest SCOTUS justices are approximately comparable to your typical tenured professor in an R1 university (except that university professors do more real, actual work than appellate justices, but again--different discussion). SCOTUS justices just are not that special--and even then, Jackson would not be a SCOTUS justice if she were a white man. Probably she would not even have been admitted to Harvard Law, though we don't know for sure because apparently it's "racist" to ask about her LSAT scores--even though legislatures often demand such information from judicial appointees. (Seriously, have you ever listened to a state legislator who graduated from Fly By Night Law with a 2.1 GPA harangue an appointee over going to State Law with a 160 LSAT? The chutzpah of elected officials really is something else!)
Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
I think it's important to be able to discuss people's intelligence, not just in absolute terms but relative to the intelligence of others. I am not a blank slatist. Apparently you're not the one making them, but I know I have seen posts here discussing Trump's intelligence and mental functioning, and in the past those conversations were also had about Biden. "Trump seems to be showing himself less intelligent than past U.S. Presidents, and here is why..." is an argument I would identify as within bounds, provided the rest of the post were sufficiently backstopped, not needlessly inflammatory, etc.
Now--very importantly--generalizing that to the intellect of "his supporters, almost without exception" or to "conservatives" generally, would be out of bounds. Why? Because of the rule about focusing on specific individuals or groups rather than general ones. Arguing that a person is stupid, and providing evidence for why that is the best explanation of what they said or did (in particular, explaining how you are not using "stupid" as a stand-in for mere disagreement), is a very different thing than characterizing an entire group (especially, an ideological group) as stupid.
despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons
I also am of the view that Trump is not very smart (though he does sometimes seem to possess remarkable cunning). You're welcome to say it, when it seems relevant, and I doubt you'll get many reports for doing so (though I couldn't say for sure). Frankly, if you brought real evidence that "Trump supporters are generally all morons" that might be an interesting post! But it would require you to actually bring such evidence, and it would have to be pretty strong to counterbalance the "bring evidence in proportion" rule, and frankly "Trump supporters" are a sufficiently diverse group that you would be on very thin ice. But hey, we've had Jew-obsessed posters manage to get away with quite a lot of bullshit by adhering to the letter of the law; if you wanted to become a raving anti-Semite but with MAGA instead of Jews, that could be novel and interesting. (With apologies to my fellow mods for even suggesting such a thing.) Just notice that most of the raving anti-Semites here do eventually get themselves banned over it. Very few manage to keep the touch sufficiently light.
So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with.
Those aren't the only grounds, those were just the easiest and most obvious grounds. Other posters have fleshed out other relevant concerns.
Now, having laid all of that out--I could have written that post better. Your concern is valid, and I will try to adjust accordingly. For whatever it is worth, I regarded my mention of the low-IQ wing as a bit of throwaway flavor text expressing my respect for Kagan (despite disagreeing with her). I really do have no respect at all for the intellects of Sotomayor or Jackson, based on many hours of reading and listening to their words, and I think that they are excellent examples of how the "affirmative action" approach to political appointments genuinely harms real institutions. But as that was not the point of my post, I probably should not have included it as a throwaway line, at minimum because it apparently created significant distraction from the actual substance of my post.
you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future
I... think that's a typo? Maybe? If not, you'll have to tell me what IW is. Assuming you mean IQ--I have seen many people on the Left criticize Thomas as an affirmative action appointment, and maybe that is true; partly I have a less firm opinion of him because he stayed quiet in oral arguments for so many years. But Alito is quite sharp, this just would not be a plausible criticism of him. If you wanted to plausibly identify a "low-IQ wing" on the right it would need to be, like, Kavanaugh and Thomas, and off the top of my head I can't think of any cases where they went in together against the rest of the conservatives.
quiet_NaN
41m ago
Israël
TIL that Israel does Metal umlauts.
phosphorus2
49m ago
The wrong goals were pursued in all of these cases.
Yeah its why I said that American superiority doesn't matter. Seems that you should be not confident in American superiority. And yet you are. Ok.
I asked this to another, I ask it to you: at what point do you think the US military asks Ted Cruz to handle logistics? This is not a Senator's role. The country's population numbers are not an important concern for him. They are trivia.
No, it is not a senator's role to do logistics. Yes, it is a senators role to make informed choices on the people he wants to declare war on. Ted Cruz not knowing basic information about the country he wants to attack is an excellent indication that he is not making informed choices.
Knowing a country's population and demographics is not trivia when you want to overthrow its government. Tucker asked those questions for a reason. Iran's government is not popular. Iran has ethnic separatist movements, there are close to 15 million Azeris. How many want to join Azerbaijan, does Ted know? 10 million Kurds, how many want a Kurdistan, does Ted know? If Syria, with a quarter of the population of Iran, caused a refugee crisis, why does Ted think that won't happen in Iran? Ted Cruz thinks everyone in Iran is Shia Persian, Ted doesn't even know there are tens of millions of ethnic minorities who have a history of separatism. The fact that Ted Cruz could not answer those questions, that he didn't know there were large minority populations, is a damning indication that he did not consider that regime change very likely means civil war and refugee crisis.
AugustDeRosa
51m ago
But then he turned around and did exactly that when Tucker said that leaders of governments kill people, as if the idea of the President of the United States having someone killed was unthinkable and that Trump could never, ever have done such a thing.
quiet_NaN
53m ago
I would argue that the exact population does not matter that much, often. If Afghanistan had twice the population (and area), the US would still have conquered them, and if they had only half their population and area, the Taliban would still have taken over again once the US moved out.
Obviously, the order of magnitude matters, as in "Is the population count similar to Belgium, Germany or China?"
Then there is the area to consider. I would have guessed that Iran was about the same size as Afghanistan, and I would have been off -- they are 2.5 times as large. This does not bode well for any invader who wants to engage in nation-building.
I would add that Iran is also supplying Russia with drones. Now Russia is obviously not the prime military adversary that it was some decades ago, but the fact that they find Iranian drones useful against Western equipment -- and the fact Iran produces enough to sell them to Russia -- clearly indicates (just as the space program does), that this is not a country full of goat-herders.
There is an example of an easy mode regime change target. A theocratic polity with only 2M people in less than 400 square kilometers, whose weapons industry is very much on a DIY level. That example is the Gaza strip. If Trump wants to prove that he is better at nation building that GWB was, this is where he might want to start.
Hadad
53m ago
Are you trying to suggest with a straight face that the anti-religious right side, whom are the leftists that oppose FC, don't try to coerce and police other people's behavior?
Hadad
57m ago
Unfortunately, once they're already in the nation, they get significantly more protections due to the madness of the American left. That's why it's very important to keep them out in the first place, which is something this administration can do -- and, I have faith, will.
Hadad
1hr ago
I'm okay with the Middle East destabilizing itself further and making oil prices more volatile; that's just a more intense version of the Middle East status quo. It is infinitely preferable to nuclear proliferation.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1hr ago
On an economic level, I agree. This is a very very hard problem. In the case of orphans, you can resolve it by sending them to foster families or other forms of government housing instead of just handing a check to reward every kid that runs away from home. The state still pays lots of money, but the kids don't directly benefit because they get substitute parents instead of just money. But you can't really do that with single parents. You can't realistically assist single mothers with state-funded foster-fathers who come and act as the missing parent for the kid. Because she's an adult and has rights, there's a lot less coercion and control that you can't use to force compliance in the same way you can with a runaway teen (and if you tried it would turn out horribly dystopian). So we're kind of stuck handing out checks and trying to make them exactly the right size: not too small or the kids suffer poverty and neglect, not too large or the mothers have more kids and avoid marriage.
On a social level, there is so much more we could be doing to incentivize marriage. Stay at home mothers used to get respect and praise for their parenting. Single mothers used to be shamed and looked down on. Now we do the opposite. People respond to economic incentives, but they also respond to social ones too. Even if money incentivizes more single mothers, turning the dial on the social pressures in the opposite direction could help mitigate this.
Hadad
1hr ago
Okay. I predict we'll not see people turn away from the idea of bombing Iran over Ted Cruz not knowing the population size. I think we'll probably see approval mildly climb up over the course of the near future, actually, though also not due to Ted Cruz's interview.
Hadad
1hr ago
So what do you think is keeping China out of Taiwan right now, if not the bombs I'm proposing we drop on Iran? Or is it you think we'd be targeting China itself, and not the chip factories?
I'm trying to understand the causality chain earlier.
fmaa
1hr ago
I largely agree with you, but I don't think the last part is true. As with the weirdos wanting to be hunter-gatherers (or worse, raiders), you really can't be those things as they were in the past, because all the good land has been taken by people doing something vastly more productive with it.
And an off-the-grid cabin in the woods isn't really being a medieval peasant. You need a lord for that. But, ironically, for the authentic frontier homesteader experience you really need some nearby raiders to potentially pillage your homestead, otherwise you're benefiting far too much from the peace and prosperity of the modern state surrounding you.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
He's a politician and this is a game all journalists and politicians have played forever ("what's a leppo?") at the least he should have some canned answer when he doesn't know the specifics.
Trump would have never in a million years fallen into that trap, he'd just enthusiastically move it on or make shit up doggedly on the spot "it's a lot of people Tucker, great people, some of the best people, but we have to make a deal, we can't allow nukes Tucker, they're very dangerous..."
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
You raise excellent points.
I would add that in two millennia of Christianity, the amount of blessing that the Christians bestow on Israel (e.g. the Jewish diaspora) seems pretty limited, on the level of "unlike pagans, we will suffer you to live on our lands as second class citizens (until we turn extra faithful and kick you out or murder you as a warm-up exercise for a crusade)".
I think one thing which might have changed this attitude is Christian Zionism:
Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
I am by no means an expert on Christian prophecy -- my knowledge of that link was mostly due to horror movies and alt-history novels -- neither of which are known to be super reliable, but it seems that a significant fraction of the evangelicals believe that the second coming (optionally followed by the end of the world, seals breaking and all?) will happen Really Soon Now, and that the Jews being in control of the holy lands is a prerequisite to that for some reason.
More pragmatically, Christians have long cared about the holy lands, which was generally what the Crusades were fought about. From a modern Christian point of view, Israel controlling Bethlehem and Jerusalem is tolerable -- Christian pilgrims are allowed and generally not hassled too much. If the ayatollah regime took over Israel, that would likely change for the worse.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
as that you believe the latter but realise that touting that principle is a bad look/likely to decrease support for you
This is the part I disagree with, because I dont think they run this calculation, following the rule literally is not even on their radar. The way I think of it, their understanding of what following a rule means just is what will make other people say they followed it. Like thats what meaning is. The "other people" are a little abstract, for example they can see what you do even if noones around (not that thats relevant in this case) but its all based on social cognition. They do this even if it would be to their advantage to really understand, because its all they can do.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
This is entirely fair- I do think unborn babies are people and not potential people. You caught me, my opposition to abortion is not about maximizing future population.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
One way would be to have some institution, powerful and widely respected by social consensus, but without access to the tools of violence and completely separate from the state, capable of directing people's behavior and social status via moral force instead of the policeman's truncheon.
Voltaire originated the witticism that in the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. Well, now Man has killed God, and God is likely to return the insult.
Hieronymus
1hr ago
Christian understanding does not end at the Bible. Indeed the Bible says not to use itself that way (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
If you have another reliable record of apostolic teaching, you should listen to it. But you don't – both Rome and Constantinople have a history of backdating later innovations to ascribe apostolicity to them. Tradition can be useful, but to call it authoritative is an error.
Fortunately that's not needed here, because the Bible speaks to the issue. If Cruz gets it wrong, well, Cruz gets it wrong.
For non-Protestant Christians, having so many Protestants in political power is bemusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying.
I'd like to respond with some clever remark about Roman Catholics in power, but that'd be silly because, like Protestants, they are too varied a group to generalize about that way. As far as I'm aware of Eastern Orthodox politicians in traditionally Orthodox countries, they seem more driven by ethnic nationalism than by any particularly Christian concerns.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
By every sensible measure? Income, GDP, opportunities, quality of life, technological advancement, etc. SK is a highly advanced modern nation, while Viet Nam is "developing". If you take pretty much every criteria that common people would use when comparing one nation against other, SK would come ahead.
I mean if we disagree on the facts we're surely not going to find agreement on their interpretation. We can drill down on a specific topic if you want, I hold my opinion on this topic to be fairly solid and nuanced, and backed by actual scholarship. But history being ultimately inaccessible to us, we may yet disagree forever, I'm fine with that.
But on exit rights, I speak from personal experience so I can just tell you how you're wrong specifically. I have attempted to live off the grid and succeeded to some degree, in more than one country. And my success has been inversely proportional to how liberal and modern the country in question is, and never total.
Consider the prospect seriously: if you want to live away from society you need enough land to subsistance farm, that's not a trivial amount and it requires some initial capital, so you need already be successful enough in modern society to afford it, as a luxury. I'm lucky like that, so it's on to the next step: you need to get that land and sever every tie you may have.
This is where it becomes impossible and if you genuinely try you end up like Albert Dryden or Vicki Weaver.
First of all there's the taxman, most places require that you pay something to the government for the privilege of owning land, if you don't produce enough to have an economic activity that's impossible and the inevitable man with gun eventually arrives. The good news is that the taxman is lazy, so you can live your whole life waiting for him, that's the story of Ed Brown. But that still means being imprisoned in your own home by the State ultimately.
Now assuming you find a nice tax free jurisdiction or make enough that that's never going to be a problem, comes the much more serious problem, and true enemy of the homesteader, and that's the municipal council. There's a building full of people whose sole job it is to prevent you from doing what we're proposing here, and as soon as they get a whiff that you're building a dwelling on your land, leaving a prebuilt or caravan on it for extended periods of time, or god forbid, engaging in agriculture, then they will send legions of cops, inspectors and various other officials your way.
Here you have a choice, either you comply or comply sufficiently that they leave you alone, making you tied to society in ways that strictly limit what yo can do and ultimately force you back into the system, or you ignore them like you did the taxman. The problem is that the councilman is not lazy. So when you start a war with them they do eventually send the men with guns to arrest you and/or kill you on your property.
Since I like to stay alive, my personal strategy to deal with this has been to leave for more enlightened shores that don't turn all ownership into renting from the government and where local officials are corrupt and lazy enough that they'll let you do whatever you want on your own land for a price.
That's still not really exit. But the Desert Trash lifestyle or equivalents is the closest that's practically possible.
And by the way, I have no qualms with technology qua technology. I find the internet to actually be tremendously useful in my ability to do these things. And I am not at all convinced that technology requires liberal states/empires to exist. Some forms of it certainly do. But not the ones I desire or enjoy.
I find it's not technology that stands in my way in the slighest. It's men and the nature of power.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1hr ago
For example, him talking about other nations spying on the US was completely correct and very honest; everyone spies on everyone, including allies, especially allies. It’s just a truth of the world, there’s nothing good or bad about it.
People getting their panties in a twist about it seems either performative or worse, incredibly naive.
I’m not sure where the misreading of the Bible is here, because I’m not sure what the prophecy he’s going on actually says. It’s plausible he’s actually right about those verses.
But I think hyper fixating on “omg” he doesn’t know the population doesn’t mean much for very obvious reasons.
First of all, he’s not remotely involved in planning the war. The people who are absolutely have the relevant information and probably intelligence assets on the ground telling them where the targeting drones should go first. It’s like being shocked that the CEO at apple doesn’t know exactly how much RAM the new iPhone has — he’s not the one designing the phone, he’s the one who demanded the phone be designed at built. As with most high powered elites, he has people to handle the details and he has been told that the military can probably pull this off. That’s all he needs to know.
Second, the exact population is irrelevant compared to things like geography, technological levels, military strength and enlistment numbers, and so on. China has a billion people, but how many of them are in the military? How many are rapidly aging members of the generation before the one-child policy? How many are women? Deciding Cruz doesn’t have any idea about Iran because he didn’t know off by heart tge exact population of Iran is really silly.
More options
Context Copy link