domain:natesilver.net
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
16hr ago
Highly recommend you watch it for the lols. The entire podcast is Sam going mask off and Mayhem who he picked up for the podcast 5 minutes ago being the walking MAGA stereotype. Mayhem didn't know Sam 10 minutes before the podcast.
Obviously no one wants to be an e celeb. I despise the entire thing too.
It's not what he said. He said "that argument wouldn't hold against any other group".
We literally just came off a decade-long purge of "ironic" offensive humor precisely on the grounds that the irony may be used to cover up a true sentiment, so what's so outlandish about the claim that "end whiteness" actually means "end whiteness", and the general condemnation of "all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry" not carrying much weight when people notice they only seem to come out when it's the author's own ethnic group that's under attack, and also that he comes from a school of thought holding it's impossible to be racist against whites?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
They're projecting force into Tel Aviv right now. You can see videos of missiles coming down and discourse about who gets let into the bomb shelters.
This is just like the campaign with the Houthis. The US drops bombs, blows things up. Who can say if they're hitting real targets or dummy targets or whatever. Yet the Houthis retain the ability to strike shipping, it's a stalemate. The US doesn't achieve the goal of 'stopping attacks on shipping' and the Houthis don't achieve the goal of 'stopping the Israeli campaign in Gaza'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
Highly doubt that Ukraine could inflict significant civilian casualties in Russia with drones. It takes thousands of tonnes of incendiaries to ignite a big city-killing firestorm. Plus modern buildings are harder to burn down.
They were basically dropping nuclear weapon's worth of conventional explosives on Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden in 1943 and 1945, especially when you account for how much nuke energy is lost going up into the sky, many smaller bombs are more efficient in energy terms.
But obviously Russia has the upper hand here, as you say.
faceh
17hr ago
They add increasingly absurd, uncomfortable and intense scenarios to make them crack, too.
And the audience is able to interact with the contestants directly.
dr_analog
razorboy
17hr ago
Except "winning" the war with Iran in this case means simply preventing them from projecting force into the rest of the Middle East. If Iran can't stop Israel from blowing up their military assets or nuclear developments or their leaders they aren't much of a threat anymore.
For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you.
There are baseline universal evolved principles of morality, but there's variation in the relative importance people place on any given moral precept and the specifics are far less universal than you seem to think (lying and deception in isolation is universally considered bad, but pretty much everybody considers this forgivable under certain circumstances and their ideas for when it is justified differ). Oftentimes there are tradeoffs between different moral principles (e.g. prioritising the individual's freedom vs. ensuring that a society is stable and ordered) and different people have different ideas of which moral precept should be prioritised.
To offer up a particularly extreme example that relates to driving I visited Vietnam in April and honestly that entire culture's take on how to drive was very close to "create chaos and accidents around you". The road was absolute anarchy, and the amount of aggressiveness Vietnamese drivers (particularly car drivers) exhibited was beyond anything else I'd ever seen. It is just normal and accepted that drivers will not stop around pedestrian crossings even when pedestrians are crossing. I am not exaggerating when I say there were times I thought I was going to die crossing the road. Vietnamese are just built different, IMO.
BTW are you the one who wrote summaries of your travels to different countries in the CW thread a while back? Really enjoyed that post. I remember you got a lot of shit for your less-than-positive review of Japan - the internet seems to have a penchant for hyping it up and treating it as this unassailable paragon of human development but actually after having heard the anecdotes of a family member who traveled to Japan last year and looking at their photos I'm inclined to agree with you (it's a cliche that Japan has been in the 90s ever since the 70s, but it's also true). I think I share your opinion of France as kind of depressing too in many places - even Paris was shockingly polluted and chaotic, and lacked much of the charm it's so famous for.
Because that has never worked, not even once, in the history of humanity?
Wars simply cannot be won by assassinations. This has been tried again and again. It doesn't work. It didn't work on Al-Qaeda. US blows up their leaders all the time (Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022, who nobody has heard of) and they're still around, doing their thing, building camps in Afghanistan... It didn't work on ISIS. US blew up Al Baghdadi to no effect. What defeated ISIS was losing their territory and army, even then they're still lurking underground.
Israel tried this on Hamas. They blow up Hamas leaders all the time. It has no effect, Hamas is still fighting.
To win a war, there are no sneaky tricks, you have to actually achieve your military goals on the battlefield, in service of a broad political goal. Assassination is a tactic to achieve some kind of short-term, minor advantage - like sniper fire. It's not a strategy and cannot substitute for victory. Until recent counter-insurgency wars nobody was even silly enough to try this and for good reason.
If Iran blew up Donald Trump and Hegseth plus some generals what effect would this have on America? Would the country collapse? Would there even be any significant impairment to capabilities? No, it wouldn't do anything beyond sparking lots of discourse and cause some stock market shenanigans.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
'the far right nazis'
No such person, there are variations. There's lots of anger about muslim rape gangs and demographic replacement.
In an alternate history of nuclear-armed Ukraine, I believe Putin will choose a different country to invade instead
...which one? Do you figure there is some priority list of countries he wants to invade? What does it look like?
In our history, Ukraine is always a somewhat Russian friendly country before Russia fucked them hard by all the means after 2000, would Russia fuck with the government of a nuclear-armed, Russian friendly Ukraine?
The Russian view there is quite different - as they contend, at some point after the early 2000s, Ukraine started responding to its economic malaise by stealing gas meant for transit to EU customers to help itself meet its own demand, with some complicity from EU states who refused to hold Ukraine responsible for this diplomatically while also working to sabotage any projects for new pipelines that would bypass Ukraine completely (in EU propaganda, this was framed as the bypass pipelines "enabling Russia to blackmail Ukraine" - as in, blackmail it with the threat of taking away the free gas). If a nuclear-armed Ukraine becomes a pariah in your scenario, is the dominant consequence that its economy is in even more shambles (so it needs to steal more gas) or that the EU objections to bypass pipelines disappear (so it never gets the opportunity to steal as much gas)?
A scenario in which Russia still depends on them for transit but now they are even more desperate to extract unnegotiated concessions for it may not be one in which Russia sees it as friendly. Certainly, my memory is that even in reality, the gas siphoning resulted in a lot of grassroots resentment towards Ukraine among Russians at the time, to the point that they could have easily been persuaded to endorse some punitive aggression against it by a thus inclined statesman.
(I find it interesting that the gas transit story is never mentioned in mainstream reporting on the war, not even with a framing that puts all the blame on Russia. Through my conspiracy goggles, this looks like another instance of a general pattern of producing simple good/evil narratives by cutting off history at a convenient point - in the media, the Israel/Palestine war started on 23-10-07, Russia/Ukraine started in 2014 with a little exemption for the Budapest Memorandum in murky prehistory, and everyone/Iran started with the Islamic Revolution. No hard questions about who shot first. Not that this is new - America/Japan, they claim, started with Pearl Harbor, too.)
I would say that the lawyer is prestigious but the consultant is not, as mentioned above. Nobody is making songs about how they want to fuck a McKinsey consultant (not in that sense, anyway)!
Plus there are gradations. There's a certain type of 'dodgy real-estate developer phenotype' lawyer that would raise alarm bells.
LiberalRetvrn
18hr ago
Well I do believe that enlightened liberal societies tend to outcompete backwards, repressive, superstitious ones. But that's not some supernatural force bending history, it's just a result of natural selection. There's a reason why countries like Israel and Ukraine can fight off much more populated but less enlightened aggressors. Liberal values lead to a competitive edge in everything, including warfare.
cjet79
18hr ago
I love being at the pool in the summer. I live in Virginia which is hot and muggy in the summer but still snows a few times in the winter. I hate cold weather. Anything freezing and below is too cold for me.
Hot weather and sweat is something I can sort of adapt to and deal with for a few hours. I've been to India in August/September. It's not pleasant if there isn't a pool I can jump into, but I'd much rather deal with that than a cold winter.
Without a pool, perfect weather is just whatever allows me to live outside as if it was inside. Post rainstorm in the summer is pretty awesome, cuz it also tends to tamp down on the bugs for a little bit.
Clementine
18hr ago
I actually think the driving example is a perfect example of how the underlying principles are not universal, since the levels of morally acceptable aggressiveness on the part of the driver and the extent to which is it pedestrians' and other drivers' job to get out of your way rather than your job to drive "nicely" varies a lot by culture.
...or on the other hand you could say that whether it's India, Italy, the Netherlands, England, the US, or Zimbabwe, there's at least a general consensus you shouldn't be killing people with your car. Except, perhaps, if you are very very wealthy. the moral Schelling point towards not killing other people who are ambiguously maybe from your tribe or a neutral tribe or an enemy tribe not currently actively engaged in hostilities against you, on a random Tuesday, does seem reasonably strong-ish
Mantergeistmann
18hr ago
It's similar to cluster munitions: a number of American allies are very willing to sign global treaties banning their use, knowing that in a shooting war, the USA will happily bust out its own stock.
Mantergeistmann
18hr ago
My understanding is that from a realpolitik standpoint, the issue is that it becomes a fertile ground for terrorists and extremist groups. In the case of Iran, given hiw much support they already provide to Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis... how much more could a disintegrated nation export?
Mantergeistmann
18hr ago
Yes. I think if Iran were preaching peace with their neighbors instead of having a countdown clock to Israel's annihilation, the world would treat Iran's nuclear program very differently.
09milk
18hr ago
I always refer to this video lecture as a counter argument of why, at the time, the decision to invade Iraq can be justified by US/UK head of governement
It detailed the information available at the time for US/UK, then laid out the potential internal political backfire in case of Iraq actually having WMD and used it
After listening to the lecture, to me it always seems like invading Iraq is the rational move at the time with the available intel, while simultaneously and evidently a wrong decision after the fact as we gain more information due to the war
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
18hr ago
Strong agree. Evidence of craziness is just literally exhibit A: basic factual comprehension. There's literally no need to assassinate Klobuchar to free up space for Walz to run for the Senate, because the other Senator Tina Smith, is retiring already in 2026, so there's already a free spot -- a spot which, by the way, Walz himself decided against running for. For reasons not totally explained by science yet, some small percentage of men just seem to snap at some point in their lives. Although I'm not sure how much exactly to put it into this category: guy was allegedly a classic prepper, and the plan itself wasn't actually all that badly thought out (in fact I'm impressed, props to the police, that he was caught on only the second house, though a mask in combination with a police uniform still seems like anti-synergy, for lack of a better word; are you trying to hide your identity or get closer/infiltrate your targets? Pick one).
At any rate, OP, you should feel a little bit of shame for this dreadful post, by the way You are treating these absurd claims as if they are possibly credible and at face value. You are bringing out the classic "they" in conspiracy framings. Who is "they"? Yeah, yeah, Antifa and BLM, but they aren't like, actually well-organized groups (at least not on any kind of national level). I think you can make a case for loosely coordinated actions on a local level, but a new Weather Underground this is not. Consciously attempting to "recruit susceptible members" is a pretty big claim and requires actual cognizance, not something that happens stochastically or by chance.
If you want to make an actual argument about how "Antifa, BLM" are moving towards an actual "targeted assassination" strategy, make the argument, don't piggypack on some random news story and stop at innuendo.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
19hr ago
Disclaimer: I was like 10 at the time, so directly I most remember just like, graphics on TV of the invasion with arrows and stuff.
I very much agree. I think what's also missing in the conversation is that it seems to me that the US population was also still pretty bloodthirsty at the time and honestly was relatively easy to convince. A lot of post-9/11 anger still without easy outlets (Afghanistan's insurgency hadn't yet kicked into major gear and was relatively quiet, Bin Laden was elusive, etc) was still in the air. Sure, Bush coined the Axis of Evil but a ton of people ate that stuff right up (maybe we didn't learn the Cold War lessons as deeply as we should have...) All of this means that when Iraq's stability had majorly deteriorated by early to mid 2004, at the same time that year the big post-op intel reports were coming out to the public and were pretty damning. In that context, I think there's a very human motivation to try and wash your own hands and absolve yourself of responsibility, and it's very easy and cheap to say "I was tricked". And even then, there's some major revisionism going on. Polling data and the behavior of politicians both seem to agree that a lot of the regret only started to spike when Iraq and then later Afghanistan war deaths continued to rise, which was well after the facts of Iraq's WMD's were well known. So yeah, people also "backdated" their opposition to the war quite a bit. All you need to do is simply look at the contrast of the 2004 and 2008 election seasons.
crushedoranges
19hr ago
the Ayatollah is hiding in some Persian bunker, wondering if the Americans or the Israelis will give him the martyrdom he's being hoping for.
Bibi is on Fox News, talking about his friend Trump.
I think Israel is winning.
kky
19hr ago
C’mon, “was a nutjob” is the free square in any impersonal murder outside of actual government assassination or gang violence (but I repeat myself). They’re always nutjobs! It’s in the job description! There’s nothing productive that can possibly come of random violence. In order for it to be productive, it needs to be highly regular and difficult to prevent, but random lone wolf killers are never regular and can’t convince people to change their actions outside of getting better security detail. And that’s assuming the killer even has a putative political agenda and isn’t just lashing out.
It’s what bugs me about every manifesto. People are fidgeting in their seats waiting for the PDF to drop, but I can tell you what’s behind door number one through infinity of this particular game show: nothing but lunacy. The only suspense is whether you’re going to get literal nonsense schizo ravings, a poorly-hacked-together litany of grievances against various parties who were all but assuredly NOT shot in the event, or personal impotence carefully disguised as a political theory with sweeping claims about Western Civilization. But that’s just picking favorite flavors when it’s already a given that the nut has cracked.
I believe this is near where you stand on the issue too, but trying to make sense of motives for random killers is like reading tea leaves from a cup of drip coffee. These people say things, but the sheer baffling idiocy of the crime makes it clear that whatever they say is absolute drivel and the real reason is that their brains are broken, they are not capable of making up sane lines of reasoning any longer, it’s just a matter of how much horsepower is left to pretty the diseased thoughts up. That’s why Ted Kaczynski has such staying power: his writing is so good and his rhetoric so strong that he can distract you from the obvious fact that his natural conclusion to the question of getting a controversial book published was to mail bombs. Insane, insane. My crank of a grandpa just self-published instead, and they’ve both had the same effect on actual mainline theory.
So yeah, the guy’s a nutjob, the next one will be too, and the one after that all the way down to the last man. It’s always been this way, but I guess there’s lurid pleasure in reading something really bent. And maybe it’ll wind up being suitably specious cannon fodder in this or that culture war, as a treat.
09milk
19hr ago
In an alternate history of nuclear-armed Ukraine, I believe Putin will choose a different country to invade instead
The alt-path will likely start with Ukraine not signing the Budapest Memorandum thus keeping their Soviet nukes, while Ukraine will likely suffer some form of international trade sanction (but not a lot, as the newly created Russia will likely not sanction them to cripple they own nation)
Going into the 2000s, I believe Ukraine will achieve a status similar to pre-2022 Finland, where they will be a Friend of Russia economically, with the promise of not joining NATO, after all, everyone knows there is no benefit for Ukraine to join NATO when they have nukes, thus Russia unironically will feel a lot safer from Ukraine compare to our history
In our history, Ukraine is always a somewhat Russian friendly country before Russia fucked them hard by all the means after 2000, would Russia fuck with the government of a nuclear-armed, Russian friendly Ukraine?
As long as Ukraine demonstrate their discipline on international affairs and don't actively fuck with others, they likely achive at worst the status of Pakistan (who hosted Osama bin Laden without real consequences), likely the status of India (internationally not one give a fuck on what they do internally), at best the status of pre-2022 Finland (Staying friendly to everyone, everyone want them to be the buffer state while giving you some form of trade access), all depends on what Ukrainian can achieve diplomatically
This is true. But it's better to lose hair late than early. I'm safe so far and hope I can keep all my hair for a long time without any side effects.
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