domain:asteriskmag.com
Supah_Schmendrick
10hr ago
The military gear spigot via these NATO purchases.
Shrike
10hr ago
The EU collectively is the second-largest trading partner of China, and the US can interdict all of that traffic without even going into the Indian ocean. The Chinese are a major importer (around 50% of their crude, it looks like) of Middle Eastern oil, which can also be easily interdicted from the Persian Gulf. While I assume they will shift to Russian oil to compensate, targeting oil pipelines is much easier than targeting, say, mobile ballistic missile launchers. Similarly, China is a net food importer, and the EU, Brazil, and of course the US and Australia are major food importation locations for Chinese consumers that could be trivially closed without venturing under the Chinese bomber window.
Unsurprisingly most Chinese trade is with its direct neighbors, and that would definitely be difficult for the US navy to interdict. However, anti-ship missiles don't work on submarines, which could sink shipping pretty much wherever the PLAN couldn't establish an effective anti-submarine presence. Which is probably ~everywhere, but we'll pretend that the PLAN navy can actually stop them if they deploy, which means they end up outside of China's shore-based anti-air umbrella to contest chokepoints, at which point they are vulnerable to the 350+ anti-ship missile salvos the USAF can deliver against them (that's assuming the US uses a mere third of its B-1 fleet at a time, incidentally!)
I definitely think the US could seriously harm China's economy by a far blockade. I think the real question is if it would actually matter to the war (I tend to be more skeptical of that) and if the US would risk the international anger at neutral ships being targeted, as Dean points out. However, I think the US throttling the Chinese economy with a far blockade in retaliation for something like an attack on Taiwan is within the realm of possibility, and it would be foolish for China not to consider that as a potential threat in their decision making matrix.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10hr ago
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things
What kinds of other things?
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
the continuation of your genetic line
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
10hr ago
I finally found a few hours to work on Tron LED lights. Only about halfway done doing it for one helmet. I have a lot of bends to do which means cutting the strip into segments and then cutting wires to size and doing 6 solders.
The workflow for each LED strip segment is
- cut LED strip to size
- cut silicone tubing to almost the same size
- slide strip into tubing
- tin the contact pads (GND, 12v and DO)
- solder three wires to the pads
- hot glue to give a barrier between the pads and introduce some strain relief
- wrap black electrical tape over the 3:wires to keep them tidy
- slip a transparent heat shrink tube sliver like an inch long over the spot where the LED strip meets the wires
- apply heat gun
- do a similar process to complete the connection to the input side of the next LED strip segment
Guessing I have 3-4 hours to go.
It seems like convenient connectors exist that can join cut segments of LED strips together. That could speed this up significantly but they seem to add a lot of bulk. So, perhaps out for the bike helmets but maybe for the runs I'm going to add to the bikes or other accessories...
faceh
10hr ago
It has crossed my mind that Ace FPV drone operators can probably find jobs elsewhere operating drones in high-stress environments or training others to do so.
Or if other drone-centric combat breaks out, those with actual experience using these things might be able to offer services at a premium.
Can't run a whole economy off that, though.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10hr ago
"In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."
Come on, man. Just give this claim a basic sanity check. An American high schooler will have an hour of history a day and about 180 school days per year. This claim would indicate they spend most of a school year's worth just on Hitler. This isn't happening. They're not spending that much time on WW2 as a whole, let alone just Hitler.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
10hr ago
Oook?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
10hr ago
Yeah, I would be astonished if random normies didn't know who Stalin was. That's not even being highly educated, that's "did you graduate high school" material.
Lizzardspawn
10hr ago
Not if he is The Librarian
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Almost everyone in America who doesn’t ’live a reasonable lifestyle’ has themselves to blame, mostly through drug use. The American working class are wealthier than the Scandinavian middle classes.
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
Rubio has not, to date, taken any position on the urgency (or infinite delay) in Ukrainian elections.
So the policy of the State Department didn’t change at all. That’s not very surprising given that the policy of the State Department hasn’t changed in 75 years. Which makes your diatribe about Blinkin as skid row wino irrelevant. You’re twisting yourself into a knot to explain away the fact that Ukraine is a military dictatorship with US approval and encouragement.
gattsuru
10hr ago
[caveat: I'm not an unbiased interlocutor, here]
Now, how this applies to some of these subcultural dynamics: If you find in any community the two or three people who do things, then you will know the shape of that community, and the impact it is likely to have on the outside world.
I think this is only true for a very specific set of things.
If this is supposed to be the reference to the Motte, it's worth exploring what, exactly that would mean. Are the original founding members from back when the CWR was on SSC's subreddit around? Does anyone remember their names, or even what they left over? Are we measuring by leadership and moderation, and Amadan tells us what the shape of this forum looks like? If we're measuring by volume, did Darwin tell you the shape of this community back on the subreddit? I'd love if it were true in some sense, where the community and outside impact was shaped by its most productive members -- a Motte that was Dean-shaped wouldn't be a bad thing! -- but no. Even for the absolute best writers, here, there's more to it than that, and looking through AAQCs and seeing many of the best have neither a high upvote score nor a lot of good follow-on conversation shows that pretty quick.
Or, for another example, one can readily look at the furry fandom. There are people in (or previously in) the fandom that have had massively outsized impact on the environment and the norms. Dragoneer (rip) shaped FurAffinity, Tourmal and three or four writers SoFurry, I'd assume there's something similar for IB and don't want to know; UncleKage runs Anthrocon with an iron mandible, so on. If you look at history, Fred Patton has a nice list of a few major creators of a handful of very specific pieces That Mattered.
And he also has a massive list, often of people (some much more active), that didn't. Anyone know who made and runs VCL without looking it up? What its ethos is or was? When the entire site died? Fandom culture knows the Burned Furs, even if they might not know the people who actually formed it, but does anyone want to pretend that these people actually drove the movement, rather than the drive-by SomethingAwful brigades? Weasyl? There is no FanLore on WerewolfDotCom, and no one cares what I could write about Chris, Lv246, and XZenGrim, even if it was once one of the more active forums of its age and focus; The WEREweb has almost entirely bitrot out.
I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it.
The Burned Furs are the clearest-cut version: they were not the first 'clean up the fandom's image' group, and they weren't the last; there was nothing unusual in their presentation or their focus. But they were late enough that some of the conversations were web-indexed, early enough to not just get lumped into the SomethingAwful anti-furs, and tech enough to have forums of their own rather than YahooGroups, and either by effort or (mis)fortune received (comparatively) mainstream coverage. Associated Student Bodies is famous for popularizing the 'off to gay furry college' subgenre, but for all of its skill in writing or art, or consistency in output (which wasn't actually that great), more vital was its ability to get decent copy available for bulk publication (and a few fans with scanners willing to hoist the black flag). At the other extreme, there's a lot of ruin in an organization, but the final straw seldom has a name meaningful to anyone except the blocklists.
At best, this says something trivial about the importance of timing; at worst, this points to a far more serious limitation on the ability of a handful of loud and enthusiastic activists to actually make concrete progress in objectives. You need more than a compelling story, or a specific matter, or a really clear narrative. You need a fulcrum, or it's just chaff.
Then what you want to find is well, ‘what is a story that really captures this?’, ‘What is a story that really captures the essence of this?’, ‘What is not just talking about the general principle?’. Everyone can talk about general principles forever, but what is an actual event that gives people a crystal clear example of: ‘This is why I care about this, and this is what happens when you stop caring about this, this is what happens when you start caring about this, and so forth. Then you just drill that into a really cohesive, compelling, clear narrative, pointing out, basically telling people this is why this all matters, and if it's something that everyone already sort of wishy-washy agrees with anyway, people love nothing more than reading things they agree with.
I don't think it's enough.
((While less confident, I'm not sure it's necessary, either. The flip side to the bad guys having an observable pattern, as much as they have alpha, here, they don't really have good stories. The argument against direct instruction isn't specific or cohesive, and it's won for literal decades.))
For example, Brigadia was an offhand comment here a week and a half before Trace published his expose (and a few days before Sailer and Stancil's and Musk's fight over the matter); genav and pilot news had covered the matter in an apolitical way in 2015 as Pearson and Rojas, and academic criticism had noticed the impact on CTI.
Props to Trace for finding the fulcrum he needed for it to get any recognition -- especially if that ended up everyone liking to see Stancil humiliated, but I'll also take just putting all these things and the cheating scandal together into a single piece and the right place at the right time and the right promotion. But it wasn't just a cohesive, compelling, clear narrative pointing out why this matters in a way they already agree with.
(I'd argue that the inclusion of the cheating scandal made it less cohesive, but a better work overall. But being a good work doesn't make it effective: it's only been six months into either bet, but I'm not exactly feeling worried. The best result we've actually gotten is Duffy trying to settle the case, something Buttigieg notably never did, and that's still far more than a day late and dollar short. Snow is still working employed at the FAA.)
Right now in the United States at least, the left-wing in the United States is going to be a lot more reliant, and has been a lot more reliant, on institutions, in part because it can count on institutions, in part because the great majority of people going to college, people going to professional school, people who are in these disciplines, and thinking about these disciplines in a structured academic way are going to be at least somewhat sympathetic to their frame. Whereas the right-wing in America...[...]
You could look at, say, the personality type drawn to high-prestige, low-pay positions, for example, and they tend to be higher in openness to experience, which tends to lead to a more liberal outlook, things like that. You can point to that sort of thing. And so, both the right-wing and then just in general, people who are dissatisfied with the state of the institutions have had to look outside those and look around to these informal structures.
Like Trace's claims about public institutions more generally, this depends on leaning so heavily on "in part" that it stops being meaningful. Yes, it's quite possible that small differences in openness to experience or willingness to do low-paid high-status work have a few percentages of impact on political breakdowns of different groups. But these differences or interest have existed for most of a century, and while there's also been a political discrepancy in academia predating the Eisenhower administration, Trace's thesis points to the evidence of a recent and far greater change.
And there's a much more obvious and more stronger cause for that change. The right-wing has abandoned by virtually every institution in the country because it has been abandoned -- or been ejected. There's staggeringly few 'institutions' where discrimination against conservatives is not endemic and overt; there's no space where law and regulation has not been turned against a wide variety of conservative behaviors. In academia, specifically, we're more than a decade downstream of the revelation that conservatives trying to build organizations in academia not only must accept members regardless of direct contradiction to a socially conservative belief central to the organization, but even accept officers; campuses have only broadened the breadth and scope of these policies since far beyond any focus against discrimination or for identity. In spheres that had external forces or pressures that maintained some level of parity in the past, like the military, after they didn't respond to more 'subtle' pressures progressives instead turned up the thumbscrews; in others, like police, it just became dogma to defund the institution for literally years. (And those, still, never became as progressive-dominated as academia has.)
Trace's response when pressed is to [insist that these pressures are "[...]not a function of institutional power[...]") because the same disparities show up in measures outside of preference falsification, when it's not to just say 'skill issue'. That's hilariously wrong given his specific examples -- we don't have the actually have the information to say anything about voting patterns, but there have in fact been massive censorship campaigns focused on donation patterns and the nearest proxies of voting affiliation we have in party affiliation -- but more than that it's not even wrong. The entire point of these campaigns are to prevent any remotely sane or risk-averse conservative from entering the field to start with. Finding that there are indeed few (poorly) hidden conservatives at the trail's end isn't even engaging with the question; it's just reframing it.
That doesn't just matter in the 'boo hoo conservatives' sense, or even the 'oh those dastardly leftists' sense, regarding why things are the way they are, or even in the descriptive sense of what would need be done to change things. Saying the left will be 'reliant' on these institutions is wrong; trying to use these behaviors to predict the shape of 'new leaders' coming up into progressive spheres is wrong. The left owns these institutions in the sense you or I would own a cheap Harbor Freight screw bit; there is nothing so trivial that they will not bring it to bear, and nothing so dishonest and credibility-destroying that they will resist the urge to break them into glitter for even a second.
And well before that, it doesn't even tell us what there will be to lead. Especially as the actual capabilities that 'elite human capital' claim that they're focused around shrivel up and blow away in the wind, the actual groups will be The Groups, in the sense of unions and minority affinity orgs and scammers rather than the education and enthusiastic and careful-about-the-truth, because whatever might have once tied the professional class to those things is gone, replaced with a dress code and a lawn sign.
Yeah, and so you can pull a small set of passionate people together who think about these nuts and bolts issues, drill into the issues, come up with serious specific answers for them, and make it very very easy. This is the key: make it very very easy for people to say ‘This is our go-to for how we solve this’. Maybe you won't get the first person, maybe you won't get the first group [of decision-makers], but then you have someone else coming in looking to make a splash, looking to impress people.
This one I have a lot more sympathy about because I believed it once, too. I can't give the hard counterexamples without self-doxxing, but to give a publicly-known one: no, you can not compete with FIRST and VEX by providing a simpler, better, easier, and cheaper product. No, it doesn't matter how bad the color sensors work. A literal decade-plus of compute advances and some mindbogglingly bad decisions by these companies makes a better mousetrap easy; it does not make a path to your door.
I think this sort of passivity and this blaming people for holding on to power is just an incredibly self-defeating attitude. People don't just give power up. People don't just give influence up. People don't just turn to someone new and say, ‘I've had a fun run, I've had a good time with this all, and you have a lot of different ideas to me, and you're much younger, and you're smarter, and you're cooler than me, and you're just generally better than me’ (Not once in the history of the world). So why don't you take charge?
If this is a descriptive position, it's true and disappointing; if it's a normative one, it's wrong and appalling.
The first rule of any systems reliability problem is to solve for 'who can't be hit by a bus'. We're just downstream of a massive scandal because too few people are willing to retire from politics; the Democratic party has had a narrow House loss become significantly less narrow because multiple members have just up and died post-election, and only missed it getting even worse because the Republicans haven't done a great job either. I don't mean to say that just as a memento mori. There's always more work to be done. Even if you're not getting up there in years -- though that makes it the discrepancy more overt today -- you should be passing on skills and getting new insights and, yes, recognizing when someone else is a better choice for a job than you are.
People have, in the history of the world, given up power. Even if you don't think it's out of the goodness of their hearts, it's simply because they couldn't use it as well directly. If the most powerful thousand people in the country can't come to this revelation, there's something more broken in the system than any mere issue of politics. If they did, and deny it, that's a moral failing on them. Stealing fire from the gods might not have worked out great for Prometheus when he got caught, but it doesn't make Zeus any less of a dick for holding it close to start with.
There's an argument against passivity in general. But knowing you're trying to take down absolute jerks matters; knowing you're taking down people who will break everything else matters. Actually saying it, explaining it, when it's still relevant and before they're trotted off the stage, matters.
But these are all lazy nitpicks! I put good effort into those nitpicks
Well, no. I actually do hope Trace's Centre for Educational Progress project is successful, even if I'm not optimistic. Education and upskilling and excellence is important, and the disinterest modern schools hold those topics in is one of the more critical civilization-threatening projects. And that, I expect, is what lead this entire conversation to exist. These points are all, yes, all just leading to what Trace wants to do with CEP.
Which means it's a problem if the way they're supposed to flow naturally toward Trace's theory of change, and they don't. That's why I'm not optimistic.
If excellence were enough to take down the teacher's unions, they'd have fallen out of favor decades ago to the first set of a half-dozen Karens decades ago, or a bucket scooped from the grease trap in the last decade. If all that you needed to do to get people talking was formally writing down mind-numbing details into a good cohesive story that tells people why they should care, the phonics people would have completely purged whole language people decades ago, and Orson Scott Card would have solved gay rights in 1980. If producing good solutions to long-standing problems is enough that's great, but one of Trace's CEP people points to Mike Rowe, and there's a punchline to that joke. I'll applaud Rowe for the extent he hasn't let politics (or getting maximum public attention) core out his brain (at least more than a Koch donation), but the man's 62, and MikeRoweWORKS has been around since 2008.
It's only skulls of travellers paving this road, but there's still skulls, here.
FtSoA
10hr ago
it arguably cost us essentially a generation of modernization as multiple procurement programs were canceled while funds were spent to fighting the GWOT rather than preparing for conventional conflict.
I don't think that's arguable. Go look at the budget and procurement decisions and I doubt you can find that being the causation. And, even if it were, the USN did not do much in Afghanistan.
Please don't blame GWOT expenditures on the inability of the USAF to manage the budget projections of its aircraft development and production. That's been a shitshow for a long time. Ironically, one reason Gates canceled the program at the time was because he was interested in unmanned aircraft development.
https://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE53E4KG20090415/
The GWOT is not responsible for DoD development and procurement retardation, because that's been an issue for decades and continues now. Thank god the F-35 does seem to work.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10hr ago
The most likely current scenario for Ukrainians managing to claw back some semblance of prosperity is probably a combination of resource deals, adult Ukrainians (continuing their) working in Western countries and sending home remittances a la other Eastern European countries, and tourism to various war-related targets for Western Ukraine supporters and other interested parties once it's mostly safe to do so. These would probably be kneecapped by any scenario that involved a forced turn towards Russia.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Idk, I got a day long lecture on Stalin twice and Mao once. Admittedly multiple monthlong units on the Holocaust make it add up to a similar fraction.
I also would expect random normies to know who Stalin was, and if poorly educated default to describing him as ‘Russian Hitler’ or similar.
While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.
Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.
There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Well you did get my complexion right.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Aren’t European soda formulations very, very different? I’d assume it was some dye or something before pointing to the kind of sugar.
And I’ll point out that Mexico is an extremely fat country, despite a good chunk of their population being poor enough to worry about starving to death. The portion sizes probably helped you though.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
Why the word "Materialist?"
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I mean there’s definitely people doing that. There’s no shortage of them- either by tonnage or headcount.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
It explains why the placebo effect exists? Due to ozempic thé average waistline will assuredly shrink for at least a little while, RfK will have something to claim credit for.
Despite Mexican soda using only cane sugar, it’s the fattest country in the world. I’m skeptical of there being much difference.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
11hr ago
I can't speak to that posters experience but my high school world history classes (late 00's-early 10's) definitely covered Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Castro.
Especially since according to woke we also have to spend inordinate amounts of time on slavery and the wrongs done to minorities and other minorities. There isn't enough time for that and 155 hours of Hitler.
We did spend a lot of time on Hitler relatively speaking, but I also remember reading animal farm in history class and spending almost equally large amounts of time on the evils of communism.
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