domain:alexberenson.substack.com
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2hr ago
Does Labour have a chance?
2D3D
2hr ago
maybe using speed
Fucking idiots think womens small frame is -1 STR -1 CON +2 DEX. Speed and nimbleness is not natural to humans and women dont get some balance to the physical meta. Except for making more humans, but thats a 14 year process before they're useful.
And they're off. Rishi Sunak has called a (technically early) General Election in the UK, Polling Day is 4th July. Effortpost to follow. Feel free to post questions you want me to cover.
Harlequin5942
3hr ago
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Even Incitatus made some good calls, when the right answer was "Nay."
DimitriRascalov
3hr ago
The architectural preferences also suggest an aversion to experimentation which, while it can produce a lot of short term ugliness, is necessary in the long run to avoid boring homogeneity and settling for not-so-great local optima.
I realize that a lot of this is down to personal views on what constitutes short-term and local optima, but I don't buy that there is significant experimentation or perceivable progress going on. AFAICT, humanity has been stuck in glass, steel and concrete + mildly-to-weirdly-deformed geometric shape architecture for prestige buildings since roundabout the end of WWII. How many more of these are needed before we can move on? For more practical housing we went from stuff like this to this in the suburbs or from this to this in the urban core.
Here in Berlin, old buildings command significant rent premiums and the districts which feature coherent blocks of old architecture untouched by the bombs or post-war city planners are by far the most popular. I realize it would be bad and boring if we tiled the universe with brownstones or Parisian boulevards, but it doesn't seem to me like modernity has really been much more dynamic and creatively vibrant than the past in terms of architecture, instead we just have a different kind of monotony, albeit one that many people, me included, perceive as aesthetically inferior.
sun_the_second
3hr ago
The Russian government (arguably like all true loci of power) is a gang. You can't just quit.
Doesn't seem like a serious argument without an actual analysis of how many developers are employed in this and the actual value add thereof.
Especially when developers are paid fantastic sums. The company has every incentive already to prioritize human capital. We're not talking about Walmart greeters.
2D3D
3hr ago
Every russian retreat is a glorious trap about to be sprung on the unsuspecting ukrops, every Ukrainian failure is proof of their impending failure cascade, every Russian long range strike onto civilians is magically hitting a hidden HIMARs located behind a baby crib, every Russian asset lost is just proof of how resilient the Russian manufacturing machine is, every Russian field 'improvisation' is proof of superior Russian ingenuity. Bias exists in all parties/observers within this conflict, but pro Russian cope is the finest fermented diarrhea to be injected into every vatniks urethrae.
2D3D
3hr ago
San Francisco is a churning hub of naive liberals turning into centrists in their mid careers and retreating to hide in suburbs somehow free of homeless and blacks. If you want to turn San Francisco liberals away from immigration, don't send them on junkets, force them to find a replacement tenant before they can physically leave their degrading rental properties in the 'diverse' city.
2D3D
4hr ago
You can recover from immigration. Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out. The same forces that compels police to stand aside and let masses of muslims rape white children will cause the police to stand aside as Hamlet Towers is burnt to the ground: can't arrest all of them with our small police and the prisons are full. Europeans are seen as weak pussies because 60 years of German-Franco-Anglo peace has been sustained by an incompetent enemy and football. Violent migrants thinking weak peoples will stay weak and docile in the face of islamist violence should remember that the Europeans did in fact have superior martial arms and valor to take their lands, and the Europeans can do so again with enough motivation.
fishtwanger
4hr ago
Good point. Maybe it's the same thing as with people, where the sociopaths turn the empathy on and off whenever convenient. And we happen to notice the contrasts between the pets that they love and the people that they couldn't care less about, and we don't see all the other animals that they also couldn't care less about.
Harlequin5942
4hr ago
Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
fishtwanger
4hr ago
Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes
No, I'm being completely straightforward here, simply asking what 2rafa would prefer. (It's a shame that that's hard to get across, in text.)
Personally, I think the dominant progressive element in America is running amuck, and making changes that sound to them like good ideas, without any clue about whether those changes will be implemented effectively or have the desired results. By my own criteria, I'm much more conservative than they are, and that's not even considering that my ideal world is probably closer to 2rafa's than the woke ideal.
I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.
So would I. I was going to originally put in something about Heinlein-style restriction of voting to veterans. I'd also be in favor of instituting Singaporean caning instead of imprisonment or fines, at least for minor crimes.
2D3D
4hr ago
Copy pasting monkey working on a dead product is not a position that needs filling. Perhaps with labor tightening there would be a focus on the new constraining variable (human capital) to determine what product should be worked on. An army of AI assistant chat app developers is creaming the fat off the top just like DEI admins, only less visibly. No one misses Google Hangouts and no one will miss Tesla Full Self Driving (do not get me started).
Harlequin5942
4hr ago
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4hr ago
Maybe go on a mostly-chaste date or three, just for fun, if she's on the same page? Have fun, get some practice, go to a show, overact romantic with a twinkle in your eye, be more frank about your life and situation than you might otherwise be, try out some conversational gambits that you might hesitate to use if you thought more was on the line. Whatever mask you wear, drop it a bit.
That does sound lovely, but while what I'm about to say definitely sounds like a humble brag, it really isn't meant to be one. I don't want her to get attached, or to end up attached myself. It's only a few short months till I'm gone, likely for good, and I don't want to make things more painful than they absolutely have to be.
She's a very sheltered girl, and if I'm my usual flirtatious self, that means they have a distressing tendency to fall for me. I'm not an asshole, everyone I've seen after my breakup, I made it clear that I'm going to flee India for good eventually, and when the news of my match came in, rather soon. This hasn't stopped a few people from clinging onto me more than they should. I don't blame them, the average guy they encounter is shit, I've seen men hotter, richer or more muscular than me fuck things up, their sheer negative rizz causing atrophic vaginitis from a block away. So if I do go out on a date, no matter how chaste, I'd rather not leave her missing me. I'm not so full of myself as to claim it's a guaranteed thing, far from it, but it would make things very awkward.
I already know that I can be charming when I care to be, and that I'm not rusty. She's better off not being the subject of further experimentation, especially when I really don't expect either of us to hold a candle for that long.
If she's that closely connected, she might wind up being a family friend in the long run, and this would make a good story for when your own respective kids meet on a dating app.
🤨
More seriously, she's doing just fine, and when we do talk, I make it a point to be both mildly flirty and also walk their through any stress or concerns she has about med school. I do genuinely like helping people, and unlike my own brother, she takes it seriously and is thus stressed out over how it's going, despite being more talented and harder working than the two of us put together. So at least I know I'm a mildly positive experience and someone she can talk to.
My future kids? They can fend for themselves.
And if you hit it off, well, you might be needing a new shrink soon, what with the move and all, right?
It helps that I'm going to be surrounded by them, more than I can shake a stick at. Worry not, that's one of the perks of being a psych trainee, they know how shit my salary is and might take pity and waive some of their consultation fees.
All I really need a psych for is refills of my ADHD meds, sadly the wait list in the NHS for a formal evaluation is 2 years long, though I'd hope my existing diagnosis suffices. At any rate, I want to switch off Ritalin, it works but it also happens to suck.
So it won't be the ideal situation, but if she's close enough to the ideal girl for you, then don't let her get away. Don't make the modern mistake of having an image in your head of what your life should be like, and then waiting for it to fulfill itself. If she's got brains and integrity and a sense of humor, and you find yourself falling for her, seize the opportunity when it presents itself. (Finding out if someone has integrity, in the time you have available, there's the rub...)
Who knew the Motte was filled with so many hopeless romantics? The prognosis is always terminal.
I think she's fun and very sweet. She certainly did a good job calming me down after a nurse behaved so abominably with me I blew my top and vented about it later. But I don't know her well enough to put down a definitive diagnosis of "wife material". She's young, she's got a long road ahead of her, and even I'm just halfway done. And I'm sure you see why I have my reasons for keeping a modest distance, all the good I can do for her, it's from afar, and if I get closer, chances are it'll just hurt the two of us.
(I'm a terminal romantic myself. It sucks.)
2D3D
4hr ago
Hlynka san senpai, notice me uwu. Private message me the address of your desert cult, I will initiate many dweebs into your musty yet inviting dungeon.
2D3D
4hr ago
Good! Call Synder retarded, Bloodlands is a polemic! But I never claimed he was THE intellectual authority, only that he is one of many, and stroking off Mearshimer just is an appeal to authority. Snyder is RIGHT about Russias revanchism, and he predicted THAT while Mearshimer in 2014 till 2022 was, per your OWN citation, predicting that Russia was peaceful in its intentions and should be courted as a reliable ally against China. Have you READ his shit? He treats Russia as a weak animal with no choice but to lash out in the 2015 lecture you cite. After Russia attacked and starts their insane rhetoric about nuking London and nazis is when Mearshimer goes off the deep end into supporting pro-Russia military inevitability, a laughable statement before Surovikins force generation efforts paid off in 2023.
Mearshimer is by no means a military genius, which is the criteria by which you judged his intellectual heft. Unbound to the neocon or neolib establishments that predicted happiness and sunshine for all in the wake of US 'freedom bombs'? Yes. Blind to his own hyperfocus on China as a threat to focus on? That is my assessment. Mearshimer (fuck I hate typing his stupid longass name) did your standard vatnik cope of 'Russia clearly had a grand plan when they attacked with their weak forces, look at me I'm so smart.' when the reality is much simpler: Putin fucked up, and Russia doubled down on a bad bet.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Synder is, to use your preferred terminology, retarded.
https://news.err.ee/1609348263/timothy-snyder-war-should-have-ended-in-2022-with-ukraine-s-victory
Look at the things he's willing to say! It's the same old rubbish about nominal GDP magically translating into military power. He still hasn't cottoned onto what RUSI was talking about in 2022 when it comes to shell production not actually being a function of GDP. Just today he's making wildly inappropriate metaphors for it being 1938: https://x.com/martenkokk/status/1792110889841066040
A few things have changed since 1938. The global balance of power. Nuclear weapons. Military affairs generally. Russia and Ukraine being totally different to Germany and Czechoslovakia in terms of politics, aspirations, goals, geography and industrial power...
He's a fantasyland ideologue who lacks any kind of military understanding, sophistication or nuance.
Mearsheimer is overwhelmingly superior. He actually predicts things (often decades in advance) because he has strategic models that work, not just a desperate desire to say what people want to hear. He foresaw this conflict, he foresaw China-US struggle, he foresaw that invading Middle Eastern countries wouldn't work out... What has Synder ever predicted? You're smearing Mearsheimer because he cited some other people that were themselves wrong about different matters.
Did Mearsheimer say 'Russia will stomp Ukraine instantly'? No, he said the exact opposite for years. He said that Russia would struggle to conquer even the eastern part of Ukraine but that it would incur that cost to achieve various strategic goals and that Ukraine cannot win a war of attrition with Russia. That's what we're seeing, from Ukraine's increasingly desperate conscription and Russia's recent advances.
2D3D
4hr ago
As long as the man is bullyable, yea the women do ok. Good church boys normally don't cause problems, and for sinics if the families/church are broking the marriage there is normally sufficient social pressure to keep boundaries adhered to. Sufficient escape valves for acceptable degeneracy (kdramas and trashy webnovels for women, dota2 and porn and drinking for men) exist to prevent overloading of resentment. The western relationship model of emotional fulfilment combined with unlimited deep diving into unconstrained (meaning not bound by externally referrable social norms) soul searching means an eternal quest for 'IS THIS WHAT I REALLY WANT' pervades western thought, much to the detriment of all parties. I will also posit that the western focus on sex and sexual fulfilment as a specific objective of relationships has also done severe damage to womens psyche, and this is the main difference between western soap operas and kdramas: the focus on sex is aesthetic instead of functional for Asians media. Sex being an assessable criteria unto itself is probably one huge reason for female unfulfilment, with the presumption that 'enjoying sex via steamy orgasm with your partner' is of paramount importance: if you want an orgasm just get a dildo. Sex with assholes is just inefficient masturbation.
Regarding whether these 'arranged' marriages work out, the constraining variable is always whether the man is inclined to cheat or beat up the woman if she strays from his own expectations, however ill articulated he communicates expectations may be to the woman or even from the man to himself. If the man has surplus resources cheating becomes accounted as inventory shrink, only reaching intolerable levels when ones own progeny are negatively impacted. This is not to say that cheating is an inevitability, only that it is the most visible form of discord in these 'arranged' marriages. Most sinic cultures have legal recourse for wife beating, so only the Indians get away with it in these parts of Southeast Asia. Malayan women tend to hit back as hard as the men, and theu have even lower expectations for ANYTHING of their men: if he's not in jail its good enough.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
4hr ago
Just one of the Dem's official programs appears to have flown in 400,000 of them already this year,
Source?
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
4hr ago
None? The unemployment rate for developers is very low. If the H1Bs all left tomorrow, there would not be enough developers remaining to fill their positions.
You're just talking about upper middle class college educated women.
Redneck white women don't do that. Rich Black or Asian girls do.
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