domain:betonit.substack.com
ChickenOverlord
29d ago
Literally saw this dynamic last week when the neighbors behind us were getting their lawn installed. A single white guy on the crew, and the rest of the crew were shouting jokes to each other in Spanish that he couldn't understand.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
I liked it. It was like an old-timey teletype news wire.
2rafa
29d ago
The dynamics are also different. India and Pakistan border each other and can fight a conventional war that escalates, they also have an ongoing border dispute.
Israel Iran would be more analogous to the actual US v Russia Cold War (although even they did/do actually border each other). They can exchange nukes but they can’t mount a ground invasion of each other.
The elites of all four countries in both the India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran conflicts are relatively corrupt and don’t want to die, which distinguishes them from e.g. Sunni Islamist terrorists. And the fact that Israel / Iran don’t have an active border dispute that could escalate is probably also bullish on the no nuclear war side.
Stellula
29d ago
I really want to explore your claim about feeling more emotions than other people, but also imagining a romantic relationship as purely transactional.
Can you expand on this?
LiberalRetvrn
29d ago
I assure you that leaders of other countries understand who "their people" are and serve their interests
That doesn't seem to work out very well for them, other countries suck and all of their people want to come to America. The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population. Countries whose identity is only their people and their genetic lineage don't have a persistent set of ideals like America does. Germany has gone from a colonialist empire, to a liberal democracy, to fascist, to half liberal and half communist, to centrist and authoritarian. What does it mean to be German? Nothing. There is no persistent trait or moral value that Germany has had for the past 100 years, let alone 250 like America has. You can justify anything as "serving the interests of our people." Every shithole country has their own "unique" identity and feels pride in their sovereignty, with their special little flag and theme song and their soccer team, and they're all the same.
Bartender_Venator
29d ago
I don't know exactly why the IAEA claims that Iran has facilities 800m down, but as far as I'm aware reliable estimates place the new Natanz underground complex at 40-50m down, with the old underground complex much shallower but with about 7.5m of concrete shielding. The new complex is still under development, which is one reason Israel may have decided to strike it now. Fordow is 80-100m down and that provides protection from even US bunker busters - by the time you get to 800m you're reaching mineshaft-level conditions which require serious ventilation and cooling facilities on the surface to do anything resembling nuclear manufacturing (to put it another way, you could cripple the site just by blowing up the aircon). There's just no reason for Iran to go that deep, but it seems to me that they claim far deeper facilities because a bigger number is more impressive in the third-worldist mind, and international inspections bodies are pretty gullible.
There are immigrants and then there are immigrants. Mexicans are pretty harmless. But open borders means taking in every random Indian, African, and Arab that wants to come in; that's a problem.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
29d ago
"shemales" up on PornHub.
PornHub got with the program, the category is called "trans" now.
Though I don't think transwomen are particularly happy about it either way.
crushedoranges
29d ago
A younger version of me might say, 'tits or gtfo'. I know better now.
Oh, how I know.
The whole premise of that particular idiosyncratic statement is that once the woman shows her tits, it is a fundamental humiliation: that she acknowledges she has nothing to contribute to the conversation but the aesthetic value of her body. If she feels objectified, good. That is the point.
Once that Rubicon is crossed, there is no going back. There is only the diminishing value of rapidly vanishing youth. Once the tits are shown, they cannot be unshown. You will never be taken seriously again, because to do so would be unfair to the literally countless other women who must compete for men's intellect without the benefit of gratitious nudity.
Aella is a woman of loose morals, literally (and with the intent of accuracy) one of negotiable affection. Her intellect shall always have qualifications because there is no end to men desperate for a crumb of pussy to validate her every musing and whim.
You can't make a ho a housewife. She cashed in respectability to ride the cock carousel. If she really cared about the opinions of others, she wouldn't have fucked thousands of men to begin with. She feels shame because she should feel shame. She gave up something meaningful for nororiety, fleeting and ephemeral. And that's really the end of the story. Hos mad. Hos sad. Life goes on.
vorpa-glavo
29d ago
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
anon_
29d ago
In an iterated game, the result of choosing your policy based willingness to put your troops in danger is the increase number of actors who are willing to put your troops in danger.
anon_
29d ago
It's just a matter of whose side you're on at this point.
Meh, we're certainly not on the side of Iranians.
Which ought to be a sign that maybe this faux consensus "all our analysis is proven correct" is oversimplification.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
The US Navy only knew how to shout on the internet until 2013.
Owlify
29d ago
It's so strange to me that people's view of a normal relationship are so skewed here. It's like they turn off all their rational thinking capabilities when posting opinions about relationships on the motte.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
It's now just accepted conventional wisdom... Everybody knows now.
Define 'conventional wisdom' and 'everybody'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Clearly I hit a nerve here, people are getting very emotional about an objectively minor issue. Dumb strawmans like 'cancel air travel' don't make the point you think they're making. Air travel exists for a good reason, because people demand it, because there are proper use cases and so the infrastructure is built up. Bicycle infrastructure doesn't exist in the same way for much the same reason. It doesn't make sense. If it actually made sense people would do it en masse. Even in the Netherlands, car travel is twice as popular as bicycle travel.
I personally don't like cars and don't own one. But I'm capable of looking beyond my own personal interests and can accept that car travel's popularity has good reasons behind it.
I am not asking people to walk 90 minutes to work. Simply use public transport or drive for long distances like almost everyone else.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
For the unaware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6yN2H3--1aw
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
29d ago
Yeah, and it was pretty obvious given that you couldn't buy pizza near the pentagon
Corvos
29d ago
I think the darker fantasy in both cases, which you see less often now for political reasons, is they’ll give it up for me.
E.g. James Bond and Pussy Galore. The old, anti-gay attitude is, ‘I’ll show you a real man’. Even the threesome fantasy is not about being used as a temporary novelty by a couple who are devoted to each other but not to you, but requires they be at least somewhat interested in the male partner.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population.
Can you offer a description of this "American Identity"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
Well, I did actually get tinkering time this week, but not much to report. I did manage to chip away at the retarded performance of my db queries, but will have to continue to do so, and what's more I will also have to go through the same process for importing content.
How are things on your end, @Southkraut?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
walruz
29d ago
This is your brain on deontology. Sometimes it is better if fewer people suffer with less intensity.
functor
29d ago
China is the largest trading partner to most countries in the middle east. They managed to do this and have large numbers of Chinese people working in the middle east by not wasting trillions enraging the middle east by bombing them. Israel supported jihadists in Syria, Europe got culturally enriched and the same terror groups attacked Europe.
The best thing the US could do to strengthen its position in the middle east would be to pull out all troops.
It's coupled with increased wages for the <1% of people who work on farms. The other 99% just pay higher prices.
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