domain:nature.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11m ago
I think you’ve clouded the issue. The proposed dichotomy doesn’t help, because the problem isn’t in the term “defensive alliance.” It’s in the justification of obviously aggressive conduct.
Guarantees form a continuum, with no dividing line where “isolating” turns to “chaining.” At one end, you have the most carefully worded pact, offering no ambiguity but minimal latitude for aggression. At the other, you have the blank cheque. Why would one ever prefer to receive the former?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13m ago
It seems like we're at an impasse, because to me freedom of choice is a hard requirement for moral culpability. This is a moral axiom as far as I'm concerned, so we probably simply have to agree to disagree.
Hyperion
32m ago
The Nazi racial theories were more grounded in reality than what passes today.
You are eliding the fact that the Nazis thought that Balts and Slavs weren't really Aryan, despite them being more CWC by ancestry than any German. Also that they were pale, blond, blue eyed people, when they were overwhelmingly far more swarthy. Nazi racial theories made no sense and they used them to justify killing millions of people most of which were fellow Aryans.
This is a common tactic of yours, to elide the terrible parts of Nazi ideology and equivocate it with the worst ultranationalist sentiments of other peoples.
They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives.
I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.
Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.
Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your heels about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.
Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most of our black neighbors want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?
campy
37m ago
the correct remedy is we can hold these people in jail forever
Not without having them parade through the US Capitol building first.
sliders1234
39m ago
I don’t think younger people understand how hard it was to get product back in the day. The strip was a real gem for Pittsburgh then. And for the region the chain grocery stores do suck.
It’s been a few years since I got primantis outside of the strip but the quality did seem different. Maybe other areas have improved. It makes sense that you could replicate the quality in the region but it did seem to be different before.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
57m ago
I don't anticipate evidence for determinism.
Then my whole argument doesn't apply. I'm arguing against Materialistic determinism, where they started with "we can prove it right now" and worked their way down to "we'll totally be able to prove it at some indeterminate point in the future", all the while continuing to insist that it's not only obviously true, but thinking anything else is evidence of irrationality.
I've been arguing that there are very clear discontinuities in the evidence for materialism, with materialistic Determinism being one of the big ones. We seem to experience free will, making choices that can't be predicted or controlled by others, but can be predicted and controlled by our selves. I think it's entirely possible that this free will is an illusion. What I don't think is possible is that we have direct empirical evidence confirming or even suggesting its illusory nature. All the direct evidence we have appears to confirm the bog-standard descriptions of free will.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
58m ago
Now every suburb and exurb has one and I think they opened one [Primanti Brothers] in Florida
At least two. One a regular pizza place, one (the older one) an absolute dive pizza place selling slices on the beach, which seems to have a high minimum tattoo coverage and piercing minimum to work there.
SerialStateLineXer
59m ago
Japan is not tropical, and Japanese food is not particularly flavorful, unless you count Japonicized continental foods like ramen and gyoza. As someone mentioned upthread with respect to British cursive, traditional Japanese cuisine is largely about purity and fresh ingredients that stand on their own.
You might prefer this earlier version. It offers no real world examples.
The issue isn't the presence of real-world examples. The issue is that the argument leads to an absurd conclusion, which undermines any reason to give faith to the constructed argument.
Notice the problem with earlier version: it is too abstract. It gives the reader no reason to care. Of course we care deeply, but to get specific is to bog down due to the high emotion of those specific cases.
The issue of any version is that it's poorly constructed and doesn't support its own conclusions against the necessary context of what the metaphor is designed to allude to, which is the American alliance system, especially NATO.
And then what? The traditional language of "defensive alliance" will automatically derail the discussion because it elides the vital distinction between chaining alliances and isolating alliances.
There is no vital distinction. Your framing is an arbitrary framework based on pejoratives and assumed conclusions without support, as support requires context and the metaphor breaks down if forced to address the context of the NATO alliance structure, which includes things such as nuclear weapons that invalidate swaths of the argument.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Part II: The Strip District
Early development in Pittsburgh didn’t radiate evenly from the Point but was focused along the rivers. The most obvious location for initial expansion, then, was in the area known, aptly, as the Strip District. Its boundaries are well-defined and uncontroversial. The southern boundary is at 11th St. at the Convention Center, and the northern boundary is at 34th St. near Doughboy Square. Between these points, it occupies the narrow strip of land between the Allegheny River and a hillside so steep there are no road connections from there to the neighborhood on top (though there used to be an incline). The Strip began as a typical industrial/residential/commercial working-class area like any other river district in the days before zoning. No other neighborhood was more important to Pittsburgh’s early industrial history: This was the neighborhood where the bullets for the War of 1812 were cast in the nation’s first iron foundries, the neighborhood where George Westinghouse started producing airbrakes, the neighborhood Charles Martin Hall of what was then known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company started producing aluminum. James Parton was looking down on the Strip from that aforementioned hill in 1868 when he famously described Pittsburgh as “Hell with the lid off”.
In 1906, the city removed freight tracks that continued Downtown along Liberty Ave. With the railroad now terminating in a yard at Smallman St., the area became a prime location for wholesalers to set up warehouse operations. The Strip had industrialized in the days before people like Andrew Carnegie could build mega-mills on virgin land, so the parcels were of a much smaller size. As the original industries left due to lack of scale, more and more of the area became occupied by warehouses. As the 20th Century wore on, the warehouses expanded and residential areas were demolished; the neighborhood’s population, over 17,000 in the early decades, was below 5,000 in 1940. As the wholesale trade diminished in the 1950s, merchants began opening retail outlets to supplement their existing wholesale business, focused on the Penn Ave. corridor, and by the 1970s the Strip had a reputation as a place where you could find fresher meat and produce than you can get in a grocery store, as well as hard to find oddities. But the rest of the district was an assortment of warehouses, light industrial concerns, parking lots, and storage yards. By 2000, the residential population had dwindled to a mere 266.
The Strip had an abortive resurgence in the 90s as part of an attempt to make it a nightlife district, but the story of the modern strip begins in 2006, when the former Armstrong Cork & Seal factory was converted into loft apartments. Since then, construction has been more or less constant. The semi-abandoned industrial areas have been replaced by high-end condominiums and office blocks, but there’s still enough industry left to give the area a raffish feel. The current population stands at about 3,200 and is expected to double in the immediate future just based on what’s under construction or ready to build. But the real draw is the shopping. Those wholesalers I mentioned earlier? They never left. When the rest of the neighborhood was run down and industrial, Penn Avenue had an almost carnival-like atmosphere, especially on weekends. Younger people don’t seem to appreciate this, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was no “foodie culture” or whatever other horrible phrase you want to use. Supermarkets carried stuff that everyone bought, and even things we take for granted now like prosciutto and avocados were hard to come by. Some specialty stores sold this stuff, but most supermarkets didn’t, and unless you knew about these places you were out of luck. But everyone knew about the Strip. If you wanted some oddity, it was common practice to assume you could get it there; even if you didn’t know where you were going you could just walk into a random store and ask and if they didn’t sell it they’d direct you toward who did. The atmosphere has gotten even better in recent years, as the commercial district has expanded from Penn and spilled onto neighboring streets. The big regional chain now sells specialty stuff, and even Aldi’s carries things you couldn’t find 30 years ago, but if you want to buy pheasant, or raw oysters, or even just olive oil in bulk at a reasonable price, the Strip is the place to get it. Hell, I can get fresher fish at Wholey’s than I can at any beach town in North Carolina I’ve ever been to.
With all the change, there are some contrarians out there who think that all this construction is a bad thing. They bemoan how they’re turning a historic working-class neighborhood into a place for yuppies and tech bros. The thing is, there was really nothing there to miss. I don’t think these people are truly nostalgic for tow yards, mid-century warehouses, and lots where they store pipe and electrical transformers. Most of these places were just sitting idle anyway. Consider: Everything in this shot is new construction. It may not win any architectural awards, but it doesn’t exactly look like a suburban office park. Now consider what the area looked like in 2008. Feeling nostalgic? If people are going to complain about losing the old neighborhood, the time to complain was well before they were born. The “old neighborhood” was mostly gone before the War, when the construction of the big mills drew jobs out of the neighborhood and the smaller industries that remained couldn’t support the old population on their own. Sure, it would be nice if the old housing stock remained, and some of it still does, but I’d rather build for the future than bemoan the past.
But these people are wrong in a more fundamental way; the heart of the Strip is, and will always be, Penn Avenue. As much as people may want to complain about gentrification (more accurately yuppification, since there were no existing residents to displace), the entire commercial district is local. There are few national chains horning in on the neighborhood. The more well-known businesses here are institutions; something like 20% have existed for more than a century. And the newer businesses have the feel of places that intend on becoming institutions; there’s very little corporate feel. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Pirmanti’s. Yes, it’s more of a local gimmick like the Philly Cheese Steak than fine dining. Yes, it’s overrated in the media. Yes, it’s still delicious. No, the original doesn’t taste any better than the innumerable franchise locations that are popping up everywhere. That being said, there is something to be said for innumerable franchise locations ruining the mystique of a special place. It used to be that you’d eat at Pirmanti’s when you went to the Strip because you heard about it but never got the chance to try it because the Strip was out of the way for most people. It used to be open 24 hours and was a popular place to get a late night snack during the Strip’s old club days. Now every suburb and exurb has one and I think they opened one in Florida, and they expanded the menu to include pizza and wings and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t the classic sandwich, and these days, to most Pittsburghers, it’s just another restaurant.
That being said, there is a bit of anxiety among current residents that the big chains will see the massive population increase push out the local merchants who made the neighborhood attractive to them in the first place. While this is a possibility, I’d say it’s a slim one. The old commercial corridor on Penn Ave really only runs between 17th and 23rd streets. The area closer to Downtown is more sparsely developed and has a lot of parking lots. After 23rd street development becomes spotty and increasingly industrial until you’re in a sort of no-man’s-land until you get to Lawrenceville. The streets off of Penn toward the river are seeing the most development but aren’t as historically prized and don’t contain many of the classic strip businesses. Most telling, though, is that developers keep opening new retail space, and so far, little of it has gone to chains. The old produce terminal on Smallman St. was sitting abandoned for years after wholesale distribution moved to a larger modern building on the river. The recent redevelopment of the retail portion has been mostly local. Even if a significant chain store presence does materialize, I doubt that it will affect the existing, “classic” retail element too much. This stuff existed long before the Strip had any significant office space or residential development, and the chains that have moved in seemed geared toward meeting the demands of residents and office workers more than those of the weekend tourist crowd. Maybe some clueless suburban shoppers will grab lunch at Chipotle rather than Pamela’s or the cafeteria at Wholey’s, but a neighborhood needs unglamorous, functional places to work as a neighborhood. There’s been recent discussion of a Trader Joe’s moving into the part of the Strip closer to Downtown, and this hasn’t attracted much criticism. Downtown residents don’t really have anywhere to buy groceries, and while the wholesale outlets are fine for some things, they aren’t really places where you can do all of your shopping. There’s something odd about a neighborhood where you can get 759 different varieties of olives but not toothpaste. So I suspect this fear is largely unfounded.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. As I said earlier, it’s not really gentrified because there was no existing residential population of any substance, and the housing is all new construction. Parts of it were seedy, but it was never dangerous and has always been a draw for outsiders. There were never any rehabs for sale, no one ever felt like an urban pioneer moving here, it was just that one day someone built luxury apartment and the next thing you knew there were a lot of luxury apartments. It was never a hip neighborhood for artists or bohemian types. Urbanists need to take note because it doesn’t follow the standard playbook, and I’m honestly surprised that it even exists.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
1hr ago
the SVT-40 is cooler and I would argue a better rifle (fight me)
Fine: its trigger is significantly worse, its magazines aren't really interchangeable and its stripper clips are slower and more awkward to use, and its sights are far worse. Barrel's also too thin to get good accuracy without upwards pressure at the muzzle (which is also something sporterized No. 1s have problems with: the Garand has stocking problems too, but not to this degree, and there's less of an unsupported hole in the stock due to its internal magazine which would prove to be a problem in M14s) so inferior Soviet worksmanship (and even more inferior refurbishment) has severe consequences. Also, it cracks at the tang unless you have the heavier AVT-40 stock on it.
the G/K.43 is interesting but ultimately a poor design
Well, aside from its gas system, which is totally coincidentally lifted wholesale from the SVT-40. Shame its default settings beat the gun to death, not that it was a concern for the Germans at the time.
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
Maybe in the US, it has always been a big no-no in Europe, as far as I know.
I remember politically fringe people like Sargon of Akkad bemoaning the idea when talking to Richard Spencer back in 2016 or so. Now there is talk of directly deporting people in the UK and Germany by the biggest hard right parties in politics. That's a big shift.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
My powers have failed me.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
But you did attend college
Not actually true. Welder is, I suppose, close enough for- well quite literally not government work, thank you occupational licensing taxes, but online purposes I guess.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Animal cruelty?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
But you did attend college. I was going to say welder but opted for engineer.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Manga like everything else is on tablets and phones these days. I remember the handful of times as a kid that I actually owned a comic book (they were banned as time wasting in my house). I would marvel at the art and could stare at a page for minutes at a time The way people flip so quickly through the panels these days really mystifies me. Especially the sex scenes, I mean I'm trying to be discreet looking over your shoulder, man, give me a second to focus my eyes.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Your biggest mistake was that I’m not an engineer, or any kind of white collar worker.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
I actually envision her as a petite, long-haired 20 something who types on a laptop wearing those bluelight reduction glasses, wearing print t shirts of Vassar or wherever that she would never wear in public.
I don't blame you for remaining vague. But it's clever misdirection if I was spot on and you just want to remain mysterious.
Edit: I was right about your beard though yes?
aqouta
1hr ago
I understand "can humans be vermin" sounds like it could be on the 'IS' side of the Is/ought distinction but I think it's actually on the 'ought' side. I don't think "is there such a thing as an internal gender experience such that it can be out of alignment with a person's sex" is on the is side. I believe this because I think there is some amount of proof that could sway me into believing that gender as an innate felt experience is real while there is no proof that would cause me to believe that some humans are vermin.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Close, very close, but not quite there.
At least about me; I suppose it’s possible that 2rafa has a hormone disorder, but not what I’d expect.
DradisPing
1hr ago
Asian food tends to have a big advantage in the west because they bring over relatives with or without working papers to work in their restaurants, while domestic cuisine expects their kitchen workers to have finished cullinary school.
The "best burger" thing is a little different. I think it goes back to Blue Tribe aversions to eating beef. Going to a restaurant to try a "fancy" burger is a loophole in the taboo.
Does anyone like or "get" monotype printing?
I have some equipment for making and teaching mono prints with charming little presses and gel plates, but whenever I look into resources about it, the professional art is not inspiring at all. Lots of kind of boring stencils of elephants or birds, lots of leaves, mandala looking stencils, dots that look kind of like packing materials, all in acrylic, which is a huge pain to clean up. I do like plate and woodblock printing, but am not going to set that up, it's a whole different tool set. The most interesting gel plate pieces I've seen included using the gel print as a background and drawing over it in chalk pastel, but then it has to be framed behind glass because of the pastel.
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