domain:academic.oup.com
BahRamYou
40m ago
another way of looking at it is that it's roughly the size of Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, and even larger than that in land area. There's a reason that during the iraq war the US still shied away from invading Iran.
roystgnr
42m ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
43m ago
I agree with you that the issue is much more complex than "it's all the women's fault", but I also think that any solution demanding that women change anything about their behavior is haram in our society, and that such changes are indeed necessary to solve the problem.
I mostly agree with this. I have been reading hot takes on both sides for a number of years (the redpillers vs. the feminists, the Dread Jims vs. the radfems) and I think the discourse overall is quite poisonous. On the one hand, yes, Women Are Wonderful and how dare men ever criticize any woman's choice ever? OTOH, it's hard not to sympathize with women who become paranoid and fearful of men when you see so many men (including right here on the Motte) who, mask off, believe that women should not have a choice about who will fuck them. Also, I admit there are very few populations I have a harder time sympathizing with than incels.
Hadad
43m ago
Europe can, at any time, start enforcing its own sovereignty and defending its borders. I believe in you guys. I'm also not European, though, so if you fail, no skin off my back.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
44m ago
Thank you for articulating my thoughts much better than I was, what a banger
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
44m ago
Splendid. Nation-destroying Syria worked out so great for Europe, there's nothing that would bring me more joy than doing it again to country ~4x it's size.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
45m ago
Isn't it better to make it optional for people to be married in such cases?
No, because as we can plainly observe, the second order effect of no enforcement of family cohesion is mass single parenthood.
I could be convinced that this is tolerable in a society that doesn't subsidize this particular lifestyle, but so long as women can use the State as a substitute provider and there is no disincentive to single parenthood, it's going to be a mass phenomenon.
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).
It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?
From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.
Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.
Hadad
47m ago
So keep bombing them. Kill all their scientists, all their engineers. Transform the mountains into infernos. Let them all die to defend their ambitions.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
50m ago
Israel has already moved their goals from “destroy nuclear sites” to “destroy ballistic missile capabilities”. But it isn’t easy to destroy all of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, perpetually. This is something that Cruz would know if he had even a passing curiosity in the country which his funders want destroyed. A 1 minute YouTube short would inform someone that it has a topography uniquely suited for hiding missile development and launch sites, with 370,000 square miles of mountainous terrain.
The “Iran is almost out of missile launchers” is eerily similar to “Russia is almost out of missiles” of 2022. Except the difficult part of launching hypersonic missiles is not the launchers, it’s the missiles, and they already have those in abundance.
SSCReader
50m ago
Sure, but that is not a 0% of pulling through as a going concern. The population could drop 80% as you point out and you can still be a going concern. The US might not be a super power any more and it might take a long road to recovery, but even what you are describing is not a zero percent chance of pulling through.
Depending exactly how a civil war breaks out and where the fighting is concentrated, the damage could be greater or lesser. It could be 3 states vs 20 with the rest sitting it out. There is simply no way that we can say 0% is the correct figure with something so nebulous.
Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism
I disagree with this statement perhaps as strongly as I've ever disagreed with any statement.
The view of history it assumes is wrong, the actual results of the liberal project it assumes are wrong, the whole thing is just 18th century propaganda that history has utterly falsified in a million ways and I think it's appalling that you believe this in the face of the world you live in.
History has no singular direction, and if it has a direction within the scope of an era it is towards greater control, not greater freedom, and if the Liberal project's teleology in practice has been anything, it has been one of ever increasing individual alienation rather than liberation.
A peasant from the middle ages is more free than you are in all the ways that actually matter to the individual experience of the world to a degree that is comical. He pays less taxes, owns more space, has more social relationships, works more for himself, doesn't have to spend much of his life in a school, can't be conscripted into wars, doesn't need to fill as much paperwork... the list goes on.
The liberal project's only true undeniable achievement brought about by mass and scale is one of comfort and pleasure. People suffer much less ever since we relieved the estate of Man, and they are easily amused by marvels nobody could have dreamed of. Calling this an increase in flexibility and freedom when it comes at the cost of levels of constraint, civility and socially imposed burdens that are historically unprecedented is bold on the absurd. It is like walking up to John the Savage and telling him he is less free than genetically modified slaves.
It's a prison liberals have built. A very nice comfortable and safe prison, but a prison nonetheless. Like all ideas, theirs also inverted when taken to their ultimate logical conclusion.
I don't relish this in the slightest and still have much sympathy for the liberal project, but where I find acrimony is when facing denial. Liberalism failed. Pinker style refusal to acknowledge that reality is criminal. And indeed when Pinker himself is faced with such questions, he just shrugs and goes on with the line go up charade as if nothing happened. Please don't be like him.
Hadad
51m ago
Even if the population of Iran has little-to-no bearing on whether military intervention is wise, it still has major implications on a million other relevant variables that accompany military intervention, like the death toll, the economic impact, the refugees, the counter attack,
These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military. The actual strategic planners and number-crunchers can figure out how many faceless Iranians need to die -- but no number will justify letting Iran go nuclear.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who confidently declares that he doesn't care about prices when selecting a restaurant, and then I point out that prices will impact the cost of going to the restaurant and prices are strong indicators of food quality and decorum and may indicate how you should dress when going to the restaurant, etc., but the guy just keep saying, "I don't care, I have a lot of money, so no matter how expensive a restaurant is, I can afford it."
Yes, this is accurate. None of the things you think matter I think matter. I can go to the restaurant dressed however I please, and I don't care if the meal is especially tasty or not. I just want to get some food.
Or, rather, not get the food. In this case, I don't want to extract anything from Iran.
constant citing of statistics from sources engineered to affirm his priors does not strike me as rigorous social science
I am deeply skeptical of there being such a thing as social science that doesn't do it. Pretty much every academic has a preferred theory explaining societal ills, and they'll pull of similar tricks to the sources you're complaining about, in order to promote said theories.
Okay, I believe that, but there are a lot of other explanations for those things. It is not convincing evidence for the argument that this is because women overall have become completely unreasonable and delusional and 80% of them are getting pumped and dumped by 20% of the guys, and decent normal men can't get any action at all.
I agree with you that the issue is much more complex than "it's all the women's fault", but I also think that any solution demanding that women change anything about their behavior is haram in our society, and that such changes are indeed necessary to solve the problem.
What I see is not that guys simply cannot find a girl, but that relationships between the sexes are more fraught than ever before, and also the whole idea of trying to market yourself online with an app (which is apparently how most people do it nowadays) seems hellish to me.
Yeah, that part of the conversation is hard for me to participate in. a) I don't personally know that many Zoomers, and b) I live in Europe, where American societal trends arrive with a lag.
ABigGuy4U
53m ago
Also, even one accepts that there is a Christian duty to support the Jewish People, and that supporting the modern state of Israel is an extension of that duty, does that really require one to enthusiastically approve of every single act of depraved lunacy that comes belching out of the Israeli military-intelligence complex? Especially when those acts stand a high chance of getting regular Israelis and Jews killed. I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest that supporting America means having to happily support the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Operation Northwoods, or dosing random businessmen and hookers with LSD.
Tree
54m ago
I don’t. I don’t think sex deserves punishment. And I believe in personal freedom – and you don’t choose a punishment.
That's why trads deny women the right to choose, so they can use children as a sex deterrent. Children are just means to an end in their two thousand-year anti-sex crusade.
If they really thought children were a blessing, like you say, they’d be more like the nazis, encouraging promiscuity and so-called illegitimate children. Illegitimate children are the opposite of their god. He was allegedly conceived by parthenogenesis or midichlorians or something, completely without sex (ie sin). While they were the result of a sex act that wasn't even authorized by a virgin in a church.
Testing123
54m ago
I'm finding this response - which is echoed by a few others on this thread - really strange and hard to wrap my head around.
Even if the population of Iran has little-to-no bearing on whether military intervention is wise, it still has major implications on a million other relevant variables that accompany military intervention, like the death toll, the economic impact, the refugees, the counter attack, etc. Ceteris Paribus, using strategic bombing to stop a country with the population of Slovakia (5 million) from getting a nuke has very different ramifications than using strategic bombing from stopping a country the size of Indonesia (population 280 million) from getting a nuke. If Jakarta is wiped off the map and the government of Indonesia collapses overnight, it could tank the economy of southeast Asia and lead to millions of refugees flooding borders and tens of thousands of deaths in chaos and mass civil war, etc.
Even if you shrug and respond, "I don't care, I just don't want Indonesia to get nukes at all costs," it's still worth understanding the ramifications of that policy. You should have a sense of what carrying out this policy entails, what its costs will be, and what sort of secondary effects it will have, and all of these factors will in-part depend on the country's population. And it's not like national population figures are esoteric statistical knowledge or something; it's really basic info about a country.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who confidently declares that he doesn't care about prices when selecting a restaurant, and then I point out that prices will impact the cost of going to the restaurant and prices are strong indicators of food quality and decorum and may indicate how you should dress when going to the restaurant, etc., but the guy just keep saying, "I don't care, I have a lot of money, so no matter how expensive a restaurant is, I can afford it."
Hadad
54m ago
No, the fallout would probably hurt their neighbors. I'd prefer we stick to conventional bombs.
BahRamYou
56m ago
Nobody went into Vietnam, Iraq, or Agahanistan thinking they wanted to nation-build. The plan was always "we'll just do a few air strikes against specific targets, then get out. should be easy."
It kind of sounds like you want to nuke them, with the way you're talking about "keep them in the stone age."
TheDemonRazgriz
57m ago
Yes, yes it does, and yes they are. Although they use the longer em-dash (often also shown as a double hyphen -- like this -- but LLMs will use the full long dash), rather than the single hyphen like you just did. I suspect it comes from the large volume of newspaper and magazine writing in the training data, since that's the place I most often see em-dashes (other than my own writing, damn it).
I would have guessed it's another Iraq, but it's two of them.
Like I said in the other comment, I actually ended up liking Cruz after listening to it, so don't want to give him too much shit over pedantic stuff like specific population statistics, but I would like to hear some kind of a plan on how to handle the toppling of 2xIraq, if this is indeed what they're going to do.
Hadad
1hr ago
Unless you were a powerless woman
Women's reported happiness, mental health, and life satisfaction have been in freefall since the decline of Christianity, actually.
or a powerless minority,
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
or a powerless person of slightly the wrong proclivity for various things including but not limited to sexual orientation and opinions on celestial mechanics (at relevant times).
Still healthier and better off than today. Indeed, I bet the gay community at Christianity's height had far less AIDs, among other things.
I'd posit that if Christianity was the ideal human ideology that caused maximum flourishing, it wouldn't have declined.
Surely you understand how absurd this is, right?
"I'd posit that if the ideal human was healthy and ate well, no one would be overweight."
Or at least the places where it didn't decline would then be much better places (and presumably out-compete) than places where it did.
Well, it was at the height of western Christianity that it conquered the world, and to this day western nations have better quality of life than places that never were Christian.
TheDemonRazgriz
1hr ago
If memory serves it was kind of both, the "young Midwest mayor" angle made him look like the kind of reasonable centrist type the Democrats were searching for in the general and the "first gay president" angle gave him energy within the party. So the combination was very appealing in the early primary season. I think you're right that the Democratic electorate at the time was too focused on the "we absolutely must beat Trump, and we need a super-electable back-to-normalcy candidate to do so" to vote for a gay candidate as the primaries went on. But his rise within the party, before that point, was definitely very much helped by his being gay.
Mu. Cruz' position is that God blesses those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel. It's less of a commandment and more of an explicit statement handed down From On High that helping Israel is in America's interests.
I don't agree with his interpretation of those verses, but it's worth clarifying this.
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