domain:houseofstrauss.com
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11m ago
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13m ago
Countries like Sweden didn't go through the war, and the Communists (and socialist parties in general) were never as strong in Western Europe as after WW2 (countries like Italy, France and Finland most clearly, but most Western European countries saw stronger-than-ever numbers for the Communists in the immediate WW2 aftermath).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21m ago
A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man.
Yes, and I'd say that almost all of them are going to be the first (childless), with a few taking the second option (intentional single mom, likely via artificial insemination or, given aging, IVF). It doesn't matter whether we're "prepared to normalize such prospects" or not, it's what's going to happen.
clo
26m ago
I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.
There's something I experience as true in my own professional life; people will do the right thing, after first exhausting literally every other possible option. That things suck is not evidence of failure, it is evidence of how far we have left to fall. We suck so much because we can get away with it.
There are significant parts of the human experience denied to me, but for most of human history they were denied to most people as well, so my experience is not hugely different. Of all the tragedies I feel most fiercely is our inability to write fiction for the mass audience (and to have it actually read and understood) that isn't atrocious. I am willing to sleep on park benches and eat the bugs if we would just produce better fiction.
pbmonster
31m ago
Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble.
For now, you could go with 80 GHz automotive radars. Extremely short range, most current military radar equipment won't detect those ultra high frequencies, and it always could just be a newer Mercedes on adaptive cruise control.
Also, the sensors are cheap (because automotive sensors are a cut-throat business) completely integrated packages (even the phased antenna array needs to be directly on-chip), and at that frequency it's trivial to not only detect the quadcopter, you detect every single moving blade of its propellers, and the rounds you're shooting at it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
43m ago
I'm not a doomer by nature and I'm optimistic that America will still be a very good place to live in the medium term. The competition is very thin. Europe is busy ramping up footgun production; Israel is, uh, let's move on; the rest of the Anglosphere is content to give up all notions of freedom and liberty; East Asia is dying countries plus China; perhaps a small country like Switzerland is the only thing that can compete.
But at the same time as I get older I feel less confident that all the problems that, as a youth, I thought would be resolved will ever get resolved. The housing market is screwed. The education system is screwed. Unscrewing these is basically impossible because, as they say, "you'd make a lot of sick people very unhappy." There's too many entrenched interests, there's too many comfortable people whose ongoing comfort depend on nothing ever happening. You'd need a true 'orrible cunt who doesn't care about making friends who manages to get power to do something about this.
Fundamentally, I view these things as a conflict between dynamism and stasis. Outside of a few fields, I don't see dynamism returning to America in the medium term. Over the longer term, if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.
MayorofOysterville
54m ago
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything? I get that's low hanging fruit but that's what a return to Christianity also implies, the wages of sin are death. If so what do you actually think we should do about the gays? I feel like we have enough Scientific and psychological knowledge about them and their are millions of them just in the US so what are we gonna do? I think that a quiet return to Christianity works a lot better when you have secular society for your gay sons to fade into
In addition to mindfulness centering outside oneself distrust of materialism and all that good stuff. It seems a some sort of neo-Confucian philosophy without the anachronistic rules of Christianity would work much better. Of course if you believe Christianity is true well than that's that. But every religion says the same thing about it. A Muslim might say the same you just haven't come back to God yet. Actually that's why English speaking Muslims tend to call converts reverts. They've finally abandoned the sinful world and returned to the true faith.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
54m ago
Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
IME, it's not just Democrats who ignore this question. I find people on the right are also reluctant to consider this, and especially unwilling to draw the obvious conclusions.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
The sons of those who beat a thoroughfare for freedom across the wilderness are absolutely those who have a place in politics.
The right accurately resists the progressive tendency to transmit blame through the generations, but transmitting credit is no less ridiculous.
It is the bitter and resentful foreigners, the unnaturalized and unassimilable ethnics, and anyone who considers himself an American and something else besides who have no place here, in politics or otherwise.
Accusing Americans of Asian descent of being bitter and resentful foreigners is a little strange considering that they are way better off in just about every dimension compared to white Americans.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war.
I read this sentence, and my first thought was: which war? Israel-Gaza? Israel-Iran? Syrian civil war? Or (as it turned out) Russia-Ukraine?
You might have wanted to be more specific — or at least give an explanation why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
I think a society should be able to carry out all the tasks necessary for it's own maintenance without relying on foreign workers. It's not a "poverty fetish" any more than wiping your own ass is. If you can't do it, you're not in good health by definition. If you can but won't, and prefer to hire a servant to do it for you, you're a sociopath.
Why is having non-Americans pick crops more like having someone else wipe my own ass than it is like... Having someone else pick my crops? Now, perhaps you are one of those people (and we have some on this board) who think that every man should be a completely autarkic island. If you are such a person, you can stop reading now.
But if you aren't, and you do agree that I don't need to be a psychopath to not want to pick my own crops, and that maybe my crops don't even need to be picked by my blood relatives, why should I insist that the crops must be picked by an American if Americans largely don't want to do this? There are farm jobs, people can go and get them if they like. They suck, though, and Americans, myself included, generally have better paths open to them than farm labor.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Your first example is one of the few places where MAGA and Trump actually strongly disagree (Epstein stuff)
I thought you said MAGA is supposed to be a personality cult, blindly following everything Trump says.
Spez1alEd
1hr ago
Not necessarily The Motte specifically, but I'm talking about the phenomenon in general, wherever it might appear. I do think that the tendency of hard-right posters on places like /pol/ to casually and unironically refer to groups with names like mudslimes, shitskins, and so on contributes to the gradual dehumanisation of those groups in the users' minds, such that it becomes easier to justify indiscriminate violence against them. Obviously that also has to be combined with factors like anger at terror attacks or crime committed by members of the group, dismissal of concerns over it in the MSM and so on to produce that result.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Yeah the nones are tricky. I still suspect they are a psyop by the liberals to raise the number of secular people but I nevertheless think they are a useful category. Someone who will tick the box Christian when given the choice between Christian and Atheist but none when that is presented is definitely not a standard believer but neither are they a capital A secular Atheist as the term is. I feel most "disorganized religious practice" is too disparate and ironically disorganized to accurately measure via polling and statistics without something like in depth interviews.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
Actually, the other side of the issue is to grow America to 1 billion people, so allowing in merely another 300M people would be the centrist approach.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Well white is honestly probably the hardest as they don't tolerate autists very well. East Asians in Asia are pretty tolerant of Autism well as much as can be said for anyone (IDK about Japan with their insane etiquette situation. You could probably find a nice Vietnamese girl in a year or two if you went there.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1hr ago
I think they're being normalized as we speak.
cae_jones
1hr ago
If I may be less serious and delve into some Cabalistic insanity, and site Psalm 89: "Thou has a mighty arm, strong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand."
So, first, go read Unsong so as to avoid spoilers.
So there's this wordplay that equates Neal Armstrong to the right hand of God. After all, what strong arm has been higher than the Moon? But I'd take it a step further, and go back to the example of raising one's right hand high: when Israel was attacked in the wilderness, and Moses controlled the outcome of the battle by the raising of his hands. Notably, he was old and tired and the battle lasted for a while, so assistants had to prop up his right arm to keep his right hand high and win the day.
People like to point to the early 1970s as the beginning of the decline of the West. Not coincidentally, that overlaps the Apollo program. If we allow that Neal Armstrong represents the right hand of God being raised high, and Apollo is the climax of human achievement (that and eradicating smallpox, around the same time), then it's not so odd that the decline follows Armstrong's return to Earth. Like Moses, the strong arm tired and fell, and so too the tide began to turn against its people. But unlike Moses, we didn't have anyone prop up his right arm to win the battle.
So to answer the question: we're doomed unless we go back to the Moon. And the Artimas program is not encouraging.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
I think you forgot to link the Xi rumours, (unless it's a meta statement about how there are no 'good' roundup of rumours in a state as secretive and opaque as China).
Also, it's a bit cringe that the US wants assurances from allies about Taiwan when America itself maintains plausible deniability about what it's going to do. De jure, the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country nor is there a formal treaty requiring American aid. De facto the US has made clear intentions to go to war for Taiwan but the messaging is kind of schizo. America is the bloc ringleader, it's the US's job to make these hard calls not put others on the spot.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Yes I agree with all that. I probably should have been more specific. I just meant that a lot of the talk of teenage brides is not actually trad for Northern Europe.
Botond173
1hr ago
A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man. I doubt any current Western society is prepared to normalize such prospects.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
Probably a bad idea to start off with a very confident declarative statement that's not even germane to the topic you wanted to discuss, then.
Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types.
What's the acceptable level of accuracy? Would it change your mind if it turned out "race" is no worse in that regard than most other categories in biology, or would it mean we have to throw the entire science out?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
You see this all the time in California. I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.
The tax situation for real estate in California is an incredibly sweet deal. Your tax basis is the valuation at purchase time with a yearly increase not to exceed inflation or 2%. Boomers are paying pennies in property tax on all their properties while people who buy a house now can pay ten thousand a year for an ""starter"" house. Another transfer from the productive to the retired.
You can meaningfully start working on a video game even if you're completely disconnected from any sort of career track or network, and can still produce something that many strangers will happily interact with if it's successful. Government is a complete nonstarter for any sort of solo work, and unless you're up for full-stack entrepreneurship on your lonesome, so is industry. Interesting work at unsolved problems also isn't exactly at the bottom of the org chart, so you'd need to maneuver some sort of illegible career-entrepreneurship maze with bottomless will to political power to get anywhere where you might get a chance to have meaningful impact anything. I don't see that many of the sorts of people who have a mindset of being good indie video game programmers wanting to get into that or thinking they would succeed at it. Sixty years ago, "try to join Bell Labs" would have been a clear path for someone who can do clever stuff but isn't terrible interested in constantly spending most of their effort in career advancement, but stable, slack-providing organizations like that are hard to keep around.
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