domain:betonit.substack.com
fishtwanger
7m 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
10m 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
11m 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
11m 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
15m 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?
21m 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
23m 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
34m 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!
54m 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
54m 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?
55m 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?
56m 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.
2D3D
1hr ago
2D3D
1hr ago
Did you realize only years later that this girl liked you? I guess asking you to prom is less obtuse than the norm, but I've had 'have you watched (scifi movie I liked) yet? i wanted to watch with (asian girl) but I watched it with my boyfriend already' said in conversation and the like 6 years later I realize I was supposed to ask (asian girl) out. Bitch, what the fuck.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Russia wouldn't try to conquer all of Ukraine- is precisely the kind of war Russia launched.
No, Russia did not aim to conquer all of Ukraine with the thunder run to Kiev, fielding maybe 200-300,000 men in all theatres. They hoped the Ukrainian state would disintegrate and that they could install a new government.
Put another way, Mearsheimer is someone who believes in great powers dividing spheres of influence and horse-trading power blocks, without realizing he's less an Bismark and more of a Wilhelm at coalition building.
That's an interesting choice of words. The US has, in marked contrast to Mearsheimer's proposals, created a coalition of Russia, China and Iran! Wilhelm was a strategic genius compared to what passes for American leadership. Was it truly impossible to pass up on inviting such mighty powers as the Baltic States, Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, was it absolutely necessary to antagonize a great power with thousands of hydrogen bombs? Apparently so!
a NATO with a significantly stronger Baltic position and significantly greater available manpower and material capacity
Significantly? Finland and Sweden make up maybe 5% of NATO's military potential. This war has already been pretty disastrous for the West.
The effectiveness of sanctions has been greatly undermined. Russia and China are working together more and more. Europe has taken a massive hit to their economy, suffering at least a trillion dollars in damage. Apparently they had to spend 700 billion in subsidies to reduce the pain by 2023: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/singapore-speech-hrvp-borrell-shangri-la-dialogue_en
Most importantly, Western stockpiles of key weapons have been greatly diminished. Western military industrial capabilities have been revealed to be shockingly weak. What good is our spending if Russia, Iran and North Korea are outproducing us in munitions? ATGMs, MANPADs, artillery shells are all important and would be needed for war with China, especially if it escalates beyond Taiwan, into Korea and elsewhere. Stockpiles have been greatly diminished for Ukraine and cannot be quickly refilled.
A multi-year period of vulnerability is opened up right as the threat from China becomes most acute. I expect some sneer about Australian bias for Asia but let's be realistic - China is the primary threat. Ukraine is not a key node of the world economy like East Asia.
Furthermore, the war is not going well for Ukraine.
Australia not in NATO
10/10 for quibbling, we still showed up to Afghanistan and Iraq. We'd almost certainly join America in any war, unlike a good chunk of NATO. We're helping in Ukraine with Wedgetails, we sent over some Bushmasters. Australia is absolutely a party to this war. Furthermore, I am also Western and have a legitimate stake in the affairs of matters that concern the West, such as the conflict with Russia and China.
Probably, among other things, that the Russians didn't have air superiority
It's interesting that you seem to think that the extensive use of Russian helicopter gunships and drones don't show air superiority. Apparently dropping glide bombs doesn't count as air superiority either. I'm sure that reassures the poor troops on the ground dealing with FABs!
If you use some niche definition of air superiority like 'controlling the airspace directly above the grey zone so much that your aircraft can fly at all altitudes unmolested by AA' then sure, I guess the Russians don't have air superiority. Though that definition sounds rather more like air dominance. In practical terms if you're being bombed by enemy aircraft much more than your aircraft are bombing the enemy, then you don't have air superiority. In practical terms, why would the Russians fly any closer than needed to an enemy with plentiful SAMs, Manpads and so on? Do they need to be firing their cannons before they have air superiority? The practical definition is the superior definition because it actually matters and is relevant to the substance on the ground. The Russians can use air power to bomb/ATGM the Ukrainians, not with impunity but with considerable effect. That's why normal people and even such revered institutions as the Atlantic Council agreed that Russia had air superiority.
What is the point of these perverse language games?
By your ! and ? and emotional tone, I suspect you feel this was obviously a bad idea. It's less clear what you think was actually the cost incurred, the chances of success, or what you'd concede were the benefits possible.
Chance of success was negligible, they were relying on 'and then a miracle happens' like the Ardennes offensive. The goal was as you say, to sever the land bridge and threaten Crimea, just like how the Germans wanted to split up the Allied armies and repeat 1940. That makes sense. But the goal was not achievable against a well-prepared enemy with superior resources. The Ukrainians should have recognized this and refrained from attacking a superior force with what they had available.
I think it is tragic that enormous costs are being incurred in pursuit of delusional and undesirable goals.
Russia can have more military power than Europe, but not more than Ukraine with European support. If Russia were to compel / achieve a victory over Ukraine, then depending on the form it could take those forces locked down in Ukraine and move them to other potential areas. If a Russian victory meant that the Russians could move through Ukraine to the Balkans, a Russian intervention wouldn't even trigger NATO depending on the country
I'm lost for words. Europe, which contains two nuclear powers, is weaker than Ukraine with European support? Europe, with thousands of aircraft, is weaker than Ukraine which might get a few F-16s to supplement a handful of remaining Soviet aircraft? Didn't you just say the Russians were a worn-out husk?
The Russians somehow move into the Balkans? Through Romania or Hungary, NATO members that decide that the Warsaw Pact was underrated and lobby to rejoin? Russia invades Moldova, another huge and valuable territory of enormous import to world affairs? Or do they teleport across into Serbia to enjoy the unique strategic advantages of total encirclement by a hostile alliance bloc? I'd say 'These words do not mean what you appear to think they mean.' But I can't even conceive of what they might mean.
2D3D
1hr ago
10 hours? Coulda sworn 4. Neat!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ma3ya_lqCLM&pp=ygUgY2hpbmEgZHJvbmUgc3dhcm0gdHJ1Y2sgbGF1bmNoZXI%3D
This is the best one I can find online. Arms fairs normally have good shit at the CAIC booth, but the Chinese uploaded videos are on pure-cancer Chinese video hosting providers.
Re the AV500 vs F35, no the chinese UAV swarms are not meant to kill any F35, only fly through a hair of incoming fire. 100 F35 with max payloads is max 10 kills per sortie, and the Chinese intended conops is to send hundreds of munitions at a time.
I wanna see that chew up MLRS spam aimed at its location.
Your implication is right, it wont. I specified 4s and the short range to highlight the inability of Iron Beam to hard kill incoming saturation fire of fast movers. IAI demos show the Iron Beam focused against sUAVs and dumb rockets, not tube or stabilised munitions. Still, the cost per kill for Iron Beam is low enough that slow swarms of UAVs will be hard countered by literal beam spam.
I paint you as a miltech enthusiast, and man you cannot believe the shit out there now. We are at a strange inflection point, and the future is really grim.
Forgotpassword
1hr ago
That or the adjacent 'acts like a brat in a romance novel constantly and has no idea that there's supposed to be elements of push & pull instead of 120% push and sobbing about how a guy she actually liked no longer wants to talk to her'
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Proponents of capitalism tell me that when labor becomes cheaper, the extra profit doesn't all go to the executives and shareholders, but also makes the product/service cheaper.
2D3D
1hr ago
There is a seperate argument that Russias idiotic revanchism was the impetus for Poland, the Baltics and even Ukraine to aggressively pursue the anti corruption, judicial reform and and democratization policies that would allow them to enter NATO in the first place. Poland in particular has exercised excessive agency in forcing their inclusion into NATO, this video at the 18 minute mark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVmmASrAL-Q&t=1520s&pp=ygUSc2h1dCB1cCBhYm91dCBuYXRv
documents the history of Polands active manipulation of polish american voters to force USA to include poland into NATO.
I do not mean to impugn Poland for their current status as if they were unworthy of joining NATO due to corruption, I am merely articulating the observed pattern of Mearshimers flavor of great power realism causing his disdain for building alliances against Russia. I'll find some other reason to diss poles later, wanted to mock their food but potato pierogis are just carb-on-carb hate (British toast sandwiches take the cake for sadness there) and kielbasa is the best of all european sausages, so I gotta think on it.
2D3D
1hr ago
Russia that having destroyed its modernized force is in the process of face-tanking its reactivated Soviet stocks
See this is the reason Mearshimer and the vatnik brigade was wrong in 2022: Russia did not in fact have the million man army of commie fame, it had a corrupt and underprepared army that was so incompetent Ukrainian spies in Belarus were convinced the invasion could not be real because the Russian forces and logistics were so poorly provisioned. The Kyiv thrust was so badly executed that Ritter, McGregor, Serge and all the other worthless vatniks Mearshimer cited as 'experts' had to 180 their assessment of Russian 2022 assaults from 'there are no russian losses kyiv has already fallen anf zelensky is in poland' to 'kyiv was a genius feint to allow capture of the donbass'. Most of this brigade remained continually humiliated by the Kharkiv counteroffensive (my specific introduction to this forum was seeing BigSerge cited here by someone and my supplier mocking that particular vatnik, with BigSerges 'its a genius trap!' rhetoric betraying a laughable understanding of military operations dressed up in distinctly pro-Russian dour seriousness) and the Kherson grind (where the retard brigade once again insisted that Ukraine had no chance of driving Russia back only to pivot into claiming the withdrawal was a sign of Russian genius).
2023 is when Russian force generation let it be the army Mearshimers fools imagined Russia to always be, and when more limited successes started, but that is hardly a reflection of the analytic powers of the vatniks. Russia stumbled into being the army of mass versus Ukraines army of mass, and the slow grind there still does not validate Mearshimers assessments. That Mearshimer is spoken of at all whereas Timothy Synder is ignored points to deliberate ignorance of the intellectual spheres and quality of discourse around: I hold little respect for academics as a whole but if people wish to appeal to academic authority it is necessary to parse competing academic points on their own merits. Sucking off Mearshimer tells me all I need to know and frankly the subsequent cherry picking reinforces my own suspicions: the argument for Russias inevitability is weak and those advancing it don't know enough to dismiss charlatans claiming its inevitability.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
and often will in fact improve their lives through providing stuff like cheap farm labour.
If you mean crash the price of labor, than sure. Or take the H1Bs for the opposite spectrum of job sophistication. Absolutely NONE of the random Indians and Eastern Europeans imported to work in high tech jobs are strictly needed. There are plenty of capable developers at home.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Maybe he was just slow?
2rafa
1hr ago
Sociopaths are notorious for being more fond of animals than they are of people. #NotAllWhiteWomen, of course
On the other hand, isn’t one of the classic sociopathic tells that as children they torture insects or other animals, drown cats, rip wings off bugs etc? Most people who like their dog like their dog more than the median stranger, almost certainly to the point of picking the former in a trolley problem scenario (if they could get away with it).
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.
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