domain:natesilver.net
cae_jones
1d ago
Watching the DR apply the same "America worst" logic formerly typically used by the antiwar left is certainly amusing.
I get the impression that the DR largely is the antiwar left, who got kicked out of the left because reasons.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
I'm not sure why Iran getting a nuclear weapon is such a disaster.
I suppose it depends on how seriously one takes their maximalist rhetoric against Israel.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1d ago
Honestly if Jews really did half of the shit they are accused of doing they'd be the coolest ethnic group on the planet hands down.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1d ago
is patently silly
It is a gentleman's agreement left over from the cold war, to allow nuclear-armed states to fight each other without actually fighting each other. In exchange, both parties can avert the specter of nuclear war. The United States did not declare war on the USSR when Soviet pilots were training the North Vietnamese, and in at least one confirmed instance actively fired upon US pilots, nor when Soviet "advisors" were the ones actually manning and running the North Vietnamese SAM sites, and the Soviets did not declare war on the US after we returned the favor in Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Soviets did not immediately leap to arms against each other during the Sino-Vietnamese War.
It applies even in cases where both parties are not nuclear powers, or only one is a nuclear power and the other is not, and it allows both parties to avert the specter of true total war, which would be so destructive as to not be worth it. Because it creates deniability. Note I did not say plausible deniability, the United States was not fooled for a second by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in Korea, but the United States did not want to invade China and China did not want the United States to feel as though it had to invade China. A Chinese army, flying the Chinese flag, shooting Americans flying the American flag means war. There is no two ways about it. But a Chinese army flying the Korean flag, or no flag, shooting Americans flying the American flag means that the Chinese can intervene and the United States does not have to declare war. Oh the US could have declared war if the decision-makers really truly wanted to, but the Chinese gave them an opportunity to not declare war, and they took it.
It's not about how silly it is, nor how obvious the culpability is. It is about providing an out. Even if it is a very silly out, even if it is a very obviously artificial out, it is an out. Thus do Moscow and DC remain something other than glowing puddles of radioactive soup.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
Watching the DR apply the same "America worst" logic formerly typically used by the antiwar left is certainly amusing.
The woke right strikes again.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
You're looking at it from the perspective of someone that just wants to live a peaceful life and look after their and their family's own interests. Iran getting a nuke and the rest of the ME following suit means no more imperial expansion into what is basically the nemesis of the western empire's fucked up and vulnerable back yard.
Even if there isn't enough public support for a ground war today. It keeps the option open down the road and makes color revolutions and that kind of thing more possible. As it's questionable to regime change a nuclear nation since you don't know what the power vacuum and instability will bring.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.
The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).
In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.
I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.
And yet.
I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
I mean, a lot of it hinges on the threshold for what counts as "hair loss". A single strand? Who hasn't lost one of those? It's more to do with what's noticeable to yourself or others.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
If the argument is “Iran is a religious extremist country”, then we should see religious extremist TFR, which coincides wherever there is religious extremism, always. In such diverse places as
-
Minnesota, where the Salafi-infused Muslim households have a TFR of 5, and the women wear niqab with more frequency than Iran
-
Brooklyn New York, where the Haredim have a TFR of 6
-
The rare regions of traditional Catholicism in France
-
TLM-attending Catholics throughout America (simply represents the most extremist branch of Catholicism)
If you’re telling me that Iran has a religious extremist problem, and yet they can’t manage to get their women to have more than 2 kids or wear a veil property, I am going to conclude someone has lied to you. Because this is the hallmark, textbook sign of a society filled with Abrahamic conviction. Especially among Muslims, where the particular sphere of women has always been greatly delineated. Religious extremism means “clerics tell me what to do and I obey”, and if not even the women obey then no one cares. So I conclude that there is no extremism, based upon this fact in addition to other facts.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
1d ago
instead finding an equivalent of the trans issue to channel their energy.
The trans issue, but on the other side.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Except Israel's had Nukes for decades.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1d ago
The sport has truly spoiled me, I can't really get into any other league
It really is hard to beat. I mean football kinda comes close with how hard they hit, but at the same time it's not expected, in the same way it is expected in Hockey, that if someone on the ice disrespects your team or your teammates you drop your gloves and just beat the shit out of them (or at least try to) then and there. No other team sport has that same level of physicality. Sure MMA has more blood, but it's not a team sport. You're not watching a group of guys come together to fight for the win, you're watching two dudes whale on each other. I don't just watch for the fights, to be clear, but the fact that fights are an integral part of the sport does elevate it. It makes hockey special.
And then as you mentioned, there's the off-the-ice component. Where you can see the player's personalities shine, and you can see the sheer joy of what they do shine through them.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Feel free to make money on polymarket.
remzem
1d ago
I agree tbh. The thing is the imperial core is nearly completely hollowed out by this and the gains on the frontier are no longer outpacing the decay at home. So eventually their system will simply collapse and they'll face the same fate as elites in all the other dying empires.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
I’m lodging my prediction that there will be American boots on the ground within five months.
remzem
1d ago
I'm not sure who is in a bubble as I can't find a single place where this is popular outside of say /r/neoliberal or the neocon talking heads on twitter. Even /r/conservative it seems to go 50/50 from thread to thread. Israel is intensely disliked by the younger generations, there is a reason the US suddenly decided to ban tiktok after Israel started the Gaza genocide. If you're basing it off of opinions here I think this place has gotten pretty out of touch on it's political views.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This is the first time I have heard surprise at a theory of 'Jews did this' for conspiracy fodder events.
functor
1d ago
They can close it the way Yemen closed the red sea. Tankers are massive, slow moving ships that are easy targets for drones and missiles. They have over 1500 km of mountainous coastline with tankers sailing in proximity to their shores.
The US failed to win against Yemen in a year and a half. This war will be much, much harder.
No_one
1d ago
...until you get outside of the cities with the infrastructure to support a constant surveillance system. Which is to say, most of any given country, including China.
Seeing as drones are proliferating on the battlefield, in 20 years a platoon is going to have an APC with a server rack with more intelligence than an small office building of west pointers and a dozen recon drones in the air at all times.
Between everyone having a phone which can be easily turned into a snitch that keeps track of where you go and military drones, keeping the population surveilled and preventing it from feeding or aiding guerrillas is going to be a lot easier.
They were doing this in Xinyang. Every single person had to use a phone with a tracking app, they were also checking in arrivals at every single building, probably noting who was in close proximity. This isn't even SF, this is present day counter-insurgency
global support flows from cyber attacks / satellite communication support operations.
Tell me, how are there going to be 'cyber attacks' when the army will go around methodically securing or destroying all satellite comms on the grounds of them being security risks ? And the national fiber network is of course not going to be left in place, it's going to be severed from the internet and any channels going in or out are going to be approved by some paranoid AI system ?
still requires you to set up a nation-wide panopticon
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
Not very hard at all. They need the phones for most financial operations and they use either android or apple, so you need two kinds of apps to use lol. Verrry difficult. I'm sure there's going to be 3-4 Chinese vendors of such apps fiercely competing with each other over features.
With global IQ of 90 and AI, spyware apps are probably going to come into fashion to prevent silicon mischief.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
All I am hearing is "just read the traffic code and you'll be fine, man. No policeman is ever going to ticket you for something which is not in the traffic code."
Sure, the policeman will find a section in the traffic code to ticket you, and that will not be difficult because some of the sections are very broad. For example, "reckless endangerment" could cover anything from your pet jumping out of your convertible mid-drive to you getting stuck on the highway with an empty tank. Likely, the traffic code will not explain how your car needs fuel and how to check the fuel gauge. Knowing that you are forbidden from recklessly endangering others does not mean that you know how to do that.
If someone wants to learn C++, about the worst advice in the world would be to tell them "just read through ISO/IEC 14882:2024, everything you need to know about C++ is in there". Sure, it would be technically correct that if they stick to the standard, use a standard-compliant compiler correctly (a subject very much not covered by the standard) then their program will have a well-defined runtime behavior, but even if that person is a genius able to wade through ENBF syntax rising to their chin and coming out with a solid understanding of how actual code would look like on the other side, they would spend most of their remaining lifespan independently re-discovering the principles of good software engineering.
For electrical installations of low-voltage systems, the relevant local standard likely refers to IEC_60364. Your would-be electrician will likely want the sections (1), (4), (5) and (6), each of which costs about 280 swiss franks in the IEC web store. Part 1, Fundamental principles, assessment of general characteristics, definitions is all of 49 pages, so I would not expect full electrical engineering 101 course full of comic strips to teach how to apply wire ferrules or use luster terminals or warn you that single strand wires will eventually break if bent in opposite directions repeatedly (or whatever, I am very obviously not an electrical engineer). Likely, the standard will start by saying that electrical installations should only be performed by licensed professionals (which is part protectionism and part that you can not reasonably trust a layman to understand the standard from reading it), and your self-taught handyman will be breaking at least that part of the standard.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream.
Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.
It'll also require dealing with the Boomers. Boomers (and especially Boomer women) see education as an unqualified good because it was good for them, and that's the long and short of it. Of course, their preferred policies of "throwing all youth productivity into a hole because once upon a time someone was mean to a woman" is evidence that education is not the unqualified good they believe it to be.
Probably causes women's standards to rise
And that they rose artificially is the main problem here.
I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.
And nobody likes being taken down a peg, much less universally co-ordinating to do so to themselves... but that said, men have a history in the early 20th century of having done this, and we're back to that sociofinancial situation, so I don't believe expecting women to have to do that for themselves is exceptional in any way. (Men and women are equal, are we not?)
Hadad
1d ago
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so.
No you don't. You can identify something is happening without knowing who is doing it.
Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
No, people can, have, and will make all sorts of observations, noticing all sorts of inconsistencies and problems, even if they never produce a shadowy mastermind orchestrating it. All that not knowing who is doing it means is that you don't know who is doing it.
Do you think that she is mistaken about the part where they shot her mother in the head? Or the part where she came to live in London because her dozens-strong family back on the continent were all dead?
Possibly all of it, possibly none of it, possibly a mix. Memory and eyewitness testimony are unreliable, and that's true no matter how heart-wrenching the testimonial. It's especially true nearly some eighty years after the fact.
Yes that may be a disaster for Israel. How exactly would that be a disaster for the USA?
More options
Context Copy link