RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.
Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.
This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.
The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.
Two days ago this preprint was posted: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf
We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
They made a COVID variant that robustly escapes vaccine-induced immunity, is more infectious (if I'm reading this correctly) than Omicron and has a lethality of 80%. Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10. IMO this is a tiny silver lining in a Jovian-sized thundercloud.
Why are they doing this? Does the world really need the information that if you mess with parts of Omicron, COVID and the spike proteins, you get something that makes Ebola look benign? Do we really need super-COVID chimeras being fabricated by American scientists? If this work absolutely has to be done, could we not do it in Antarctica, behind a 6 month quarantine for anything or anyone that leaves? They actually did it in a BSL-3, not even a top level BSL-4 lab.
I think they shouldn't have done this work and certainly shouldn't have published it upon doing it and finding these results.
It really puts a dark spin on Boston's 'National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories' who helped with this operation. And of course, this got NAID funding too, so your American tax dollars are going towards this. There seems to be loop where bio-scientists decide to do really exciting, fulfilling work making chimeras, slicing up viruses and sticking them together, adding furin cleavage sites. Internally they wonder about the possibilities of human manipulation in the origins of COVID. But officially they stick to a party line that it's just a natural evolution. Otherwise all hell breaks lose, there's a massive blow to the credibility of their profession and an end to the gravy train of exciting, fun research and govt grants. And so because there's no official stance that the leak had anything to do with gain-of-function, of humanized cells in mice being used to test these horrors, then the fun continues!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
All across economics there's way too much interest in the demand side, not nearly enough in supply-side economics.
In Australia, there's a proposal to put a price cap on domestically sold natural gas, which we are a major producer and exporter of. Because the Europeans don't want to buy Russian gas (and someone influential is blowing up pipelines in pursuit of this agenda), they've been sucking out the gas from the rest of the world. The Australian gas industry is unhappy with the pipe caps and threatens to withdraw investment. 'Greedy companies making super-profits' on one side and 'Soviet style planned economy, Venezuela' on the other.
But nobody, gas companies excepted, is thinking about how to produce more gas! No matter how we or anyone manipulates the prices or export control orders, we cannot legislate gas out of the ground. We should've been producing more gas from the get-go, approving projects for export and domestic consumption. That directly alleviates the core problem, which is a shortage of supply. We could have a simple, quick regulatory system for gas production. Instead we have a very slow, expensive system where various interest groups get to wage lawfare against development. And so we get less gas. House prices are similar, that's the NIMBY issue in a nutshell. Power prices are another issue, nobody wants to build any new coal plants due to climate targets and so the price of power rises continually. There are costs to producing gas, issues with basins getting contaminated and so on. But there are also costs to having a giant legal mess of regulation constraining development for 6 years on a single project. It doesn't take that long to drill gas wells. There's plenty of gas in the ground.
A good way to reduce inflation is to lower energy prices. Energy prices are included in just about everything else. Yet instead everyone is just focusing on reducing demand by raising mortgage repayments. It wasn't macro-economic reform that produced the industrial revolution, it wasn't central banks making steam engines and industry. It was actual technical development and the efficient allocation of capital that made people richer, something governments don't seem to appreciate. If they want to make the economy better, they need to do micro-economic reform to make it easier to generate wealth.
I think one cause of excessive amounts of capital rushing into financial schemes, apps and crypto is that the real world is chock full of regulations that make it too complicated to build anything. Want to build apartments, factories, railways, gas wells? You need permission, you need to consult stakeholders, you need to get environmental assessments, consult indigenous peoples, protect 'vulnerable' species, pass endless legal checks. If you want to make something in crypto, you can just get going, release your white paper, airdrop your tokens, get the software working. Now the cost of this is that there are a bunch of scams and shitcoins. But there is certainly no shortage of innovation, things happen quickly.
Near zero interest rates could have encouraged broad development across the whole of society. The US at least managed a fracking boom that is paying off nicely now. I think regulations channeled too much of this money into 'tech' and housing. Finance is a culture because much of industry has been crippled.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me
What do you actually do as a self-described effete button-pusher? Something in finance I'm guessing. Much of finance has nothing to do with the real economy, it is an actively parasitic element. This is especially so in Britain, where the pound is propped up by a bloated financial sector to the detriment of real industries. We do not need enormous derivative and collateralization schemes to advance technological civilization. Things ran just fine (indeed they ran better) back before financial services was prestigious and lucrative. Indeed, the lesser sons of well-to-do families did a far better job running the financial system than the galaxy-brain quants and managers running it now. This financial experiment of 'lets transfer our industries to poor countries to exploit labour differentials' was the most idiotic decision in human history, it was naked looting of national strength for private gain. Only now are the astonished thieves in the economic and political class realizing the extent of their folly. Only now are they beginning to understand what happens when they break the social contract.
Things ran just fine before millions of Indians and Africans were imported to Britain. Indeed, the country was one of the greatest world powers, at the forefront of science and industry. There was next to no crime. There was a strong social contract. There were no Pakistani rape gangs aided and abetted by the same anti-racist ideas that aid you.
These same people that you keep sneering at are descended from the ones who saved India from Imperial Japan, who would probably have been somewhat less lenient with the affirmative action quotas. Do you feel no shame in constantly abusing your benefactors?
All of the problems the elites are flailing and failing to manage are purely self-inflicted. Demographic decline? Maybe they shouldn't have tried so hard to lower fertility due to 'overpopulation'. They could've kept making houses so that young people could've had families (but that would've lowered real estate appreciation). Refusing to take care of older family members? They installed the pension system, they made the perverse incentives. Their whole job is to lead, that's why they get their privileges and pay.
the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country
They were selected because some greedy university wanted to pump up its income by selling access to a higher-wage labour market. They were selected because they keep labour costs down and pump up property prices. They were selected because some Labour politician wanted to rub the Right's nose in diversity, like you've been saying.
The elites have indeed been mashing 'defect' as hard as they can and are clutching pearls the moment their subjects begin to retaliate.
I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear.
I think it's about cost-benefit ratios. Suppose you're an adventurer going out to slay a monster. Maybe you'll go for a band of goblins for 40 gold pieces, or a dragon for 1000 gold pieces, a knighthood and universal fame. You wouldn't go out to slay a dragon for 40 gold pieces not because you're cowardly but because the risks and dangers aren't worth the reward.
Young men are notorious for being the bravest and most fearless. Young men do the fighting and dying in war and crime, they found startups and create new things for good or ill. So long as the incentives match up, young men are perfectly prepared to take risks.
I think the incentives don't match up for the bulk of young men to go out wooing girls like they used to. The status of being a boyfriend is fairly low, there are semi-common complaints about going out on a date being like a job interview (in other words a humiliation ritual/interrogation). There are significant financial costs maintaining relationships. There are cultural expectations that the man mustn't do anything wrong like sleeping with a drunk girl while drunk or approaching in the wrong ways and these are strong expectations, a huge amount of power is going into 'don't be a creep/sex pest'. There's a huge political divide between the sexes these days, it's semi-commonly expected for the man to lie about his true beliefs.
Moving on to marriage, again the status of the husband is not very high. He is not really the man of the house unless there's a burglar or something. Marriage is not 'till death do us part'. There is not really much he can do about nagging or a dead bedroom except an expensive divorce. As far as the legal system is concerned, he is clearly the second parent when it comes to raising (incredibly expensive if done the high-status way) children. Possibly the third parent, behind the state education system. And there's all kinds of media that presents the husband as a loser/fool while the wife is strong and wise.
My point isn't so much the classic 'porn cheaper' discourse so much as it's a matter of status and respect manipulation. Of course it's easier and safer to stay at home and not go out to war. But the status of warriors used to be kept very high, people would sing songs about the glory and valour of these proud defenders of the fatherland. And once he reached the front, there was cameraderie and morale, a mission to achieve that kept him fighting even through death and disease. Militaries are underrated as social institutions, they did an amazing job getting people to do things one would naively imagine to be impossible.
It's not just "Why looks-max, develop game, get fit at the gym, develop hobbies that bring one into contact with women without actively seeming lecherous, learn to interpret these complex semi-passive signals, woo a woman, take her out on appropriate dates and wield good sexual skills... when I have Biggus Tittus from anime, custom-tailored to appeal to me for free?"
The key thing is status here. Many would do all those costly things to end up in a high-status position. Look at South Korea, they exam-max super hard to get into Samsung and the opportunity to work even harder competing with the other elite rat-race enthusiasts. Then there are the gigachads who sleep with hundreds of women, that's a high status position in our culture. Of the looksmaxxing high-effort young men, I expect that's more their goal than the socially desirable 'loyal productive monogamous husband'. They're not going to do all that for a low-status position. Incels aren't satisfied with Biggus Tittus the anime girl or even a prostitute, they want status and respect.
Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships. However, I think more effort needs to go into nerfing the dragon (making relations between the sexes less tense) and/or buffing the reward (making married men higher status, not just in cheap words of conservative speeches but real privileges).
"Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage" isn't going to cut it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!
The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that season 1 was made by Nic Pizzolatto, season 4 was made by Issa López.
I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them. This is over populations of course, exceptions exist. There are male ways of telling a story - plot-focused, rational, consistent setting, character agency, combat, violence, progression and character advancement. Then there are female ways of telling a story - character-focused, plot doesn't necessarily make sense, emphasis on emotions and romance. Great writers can appeal to both but that's hard. You can tell I don't really understand or appreciate the female side of things.
I think this is most obvious with the weakest, most unrestrained authors. If you go on FFN or spacebattles or webnovel, you find stories about men advancing their position with hard work and clever tactics. They fight and overcome enemies and court women, sometimes getting a harem. In the case of Harry Potter stories, there's a trope of Harry Potter hitting the gym, using some rituals to get stronger, taking control of his money from Dumbledore and getting a harem of hot Slytherins. If you go through and search by likes, that's what you'll see.
Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches - Revenge is Best Served Raw
Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin
Meanwhile on female dominated places like AO3, you find endless romance and homosexuality. Putting the ocean of Harry/Draco to one side, there's a huge emphasis on shipping. Who do people end up with? Are there love triangles? Can there be more love triangles? Angst, rape, therapy? Plot is unimportant in and of itself, character relationships are exciting. There are even tagging features so you can search for exactly what ship you want. Often they take characters out of their world (not mechanically like an isekai) and reimagine them in a different setting - they could be at a normal high school together. Just to make sure there's no combat. Or they make up this 'soulmate' mechanic where people can write words on eachother's skin. It's a whole other world to male fiction.
Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love
you've got the antidote for me
Now if you're like me you might feel a little cringe at the male power fantasy stories. I imagine most here have more exacting standards of taste. But you'll feel revulsion at 370,000 words of:
'Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.'
Or:
"Sirius is in boarding school, Remus is in hospital, and they don't know each other until Sirius texts the wrong number."
Who cares about this stuff? Well, apparently women like it. I blame the influence of women on Star Wars. George Lucas's Star Wars was telling a male story, Kathleen Kennedy was telling a female story (boy does AO3 love Rey/Kylo). It's less obvious at this higher level since it's not out in your face but it is still there. Likewise in True Detective, I imagine.
'Race is a social construct'
I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.
But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.
We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.
Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).
"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."
"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested
Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?
Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.
Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984
Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.
People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads
the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero
What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?
If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?
Why? Just to stick it to Trump?
They want to replace and degrade whites and white men in particular. There's an elite consensus that this is the way to go.
Economically - diversity quotas, govt contracts favouring non-white companies, hostile workplace environment lawsuits and affirmative action. We see various leaked information showing how white men were disfavoured in RAF hiring, how the USAF plans to make its staff more representative of America, how 20% of HR workers admit they've done it, IIRC.
Socially - see https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds for a huge list of examples in advertising. I can't think of any modern ads that sneer at blacks, with the exception of that Chinese ad where a young woman put her black suitor in the washing machine until he turned Chinese. There's also historical revision to prioritize the black-slavery/civil rights narrative in US history. I know enough about historiography to know that you can present and choose different facts to produce hugely different narratives, even before you start lying outright. There's also the whole concept of white privilege.
Physically - see mass immigration, both legal and illegal is the most obvious case. I suppose one could also argue that progressive taxation takes from whites and Asians, gives to blacks and browns, artificially lowering the fertility of productive groups and raising that of less productive groups.
Categorically - see the developing practice of capitalizing 'Black' and 'Brown' while decapitalizing 'white'. Delta Airlines sent a memo specifying this just the other day. The old rule was that ethnicities, regions and states like Caucasian, European or French were capitalized while colours weren't. The new rule clearly singles out whites as not being a real group with a shared identity. See also Ignatiev's theoretical work on undermining whiteness as an identity.
Alternately, observe how traditionally white countries like England are being recategorized as 'nations of immigrants', how the BBC works hard to find and fabricate diversity in history. A Doctor Who episode set in the Victorian era showed 1/3 of London being black/brown with the Doctor remarking that 'history was a whitewash'.
It's easily within the US's capabilities to prevent illegal immigration. This isn't the Russian or Chinese army on the other side of the world (which the US plans to defeat). It's unarmed, disorganized, poorly funded people right next to the US, in a hemisphere the US dominates, hoping to enter and work a job without being imprisoned or deported. Illegal immigration is a political choice for any rich, strong power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
On the subject of Musk, I reckon he reveals just how much management skills are ignored and denigrated in society. In about half the Musk conversations I've seen, people say 'oh it's his engineers who make the brilliant inventions, he just does media, finance, (did you hear about his father's SOUTH AFRICAN diamond mine?) cult of personality'
If the quality of engineers is all that matters, why don't we just sack all the engineers at NASA, who've done fuck all after the Space Shuttle, which was itself enormously cost-inefficient?
Hiring the right engineers, putting them in the right places and managing their projects in the right way is essential. Few know how to do this right. Bezos's rockets aren't successful - but he's rich enough to get good engineers. If he knew how to pick them and manage their work, it stands to reason that his rocket company (founded in 2000, launching only small rockets that don't even achieve orbit I believe) would be more high-profile. Perhaps there's a separate skill needed for running rockets than running Amazon or he didn't spend enough time on Blue Origin or whatever, I'm confident that Bezos has a similar capability.
Musk interviewed and decided upon the first thousand or so employees at SpaceX himself, he clearly did a pretty good job of it. I recall from the same book that he was poaching people off the F-35 program, people who were basically solely devoted to a single bolt on the fuselage or something of that nature. The established space launch companies were all stifling bureaucracies.
Similarly, Napoleon's soldiers did all the fighting but the general himself was indispensable. Napoleon picked out the Imperial Marshals, planned campaigns, often decided where battles would be fought and made the critical decisions in combat. That's the essence of military genius. Musk has business and project management genius, achieving impressive results fairly quickly. His wisdom and political skills are more dubious - Bezos might have the upper hand in that less obvious domain.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It seems like you and the rest of the world are coming around to Mearsheimer's point of view, 11 years late and with everyone in a much worse off position.
This dynamic could have been predicted! It was predicted! He predicted it! Mearsheimer predicted that if there was no sustained and sincere effort to keep Ukraine neutral post-2014 Russia would attack and wreck the country. He said that if we kept on with the 'Ukraine is totally going to be in NATO one day, let's arm and fund and encourage them' approach it was going to end very badly for Ukraine. He said that Russia would wreck Ukraine if NATO integration continued. He said they probably couldn't conquer the whole country but had the power to wreck it such that Ukraine was totally dysfunctional and bereft of the industrial centres in the East. He said that Russia wouldn't tolerate NATO expanding into Ukraine for geographical reasons, plus the large Russian minority that Ukrainian nationalists would feel emboldened to harass.
And based on his analysis of the situation, he proposed building Ukraine up economically as a neutral country without NATO or anything. Now it seems like that's what we're coming around to, after Ukraine has been wrecked, after the Russians have gotten very angry with the West, after trillions in economic damage to Europe, after hundreds of thousands of deaths, after arms stockpiles being depleted, after a message being sent 'if your invasion fails double down and try harder, fight on to victory'. This was predictable in advance!
Imagine if people just listened to the expert as opposed to the 'experts'!
Mearsheimer was right about Ukraine in 2014. He was right in 2023 when he said 'the counteroffensive is not going to work, Ukraine is still doomed'. He was right about not invading Iraq back in 2003. He was right about China becoming a major power with opposing ambitions to the US back in the 2000s.
In the past I had some very snooty, arrogant responses about how Mearsheimer was senile or retarded or some unsophisticated undergraduate-tier theorist. I would like to see how the predictive track record of these people compares with Mearsheimer.
International relations is like economics in that there are many schools of thought. Some are better than others, some actually work and others are popular and sound great but don't work. Realism works. Realists like Mearsheimer actually predict things correctly. There are distinctions within realism, different models of thought that can be applied in different circumstances but realism as a whole is generally superior. This liberal/constructivist 'we have to do the right thing' interventionist camp doesn't work and it's not even moral, it gets lots of people killed at great expense and usually makes the situation worse. If you want to read more about this, check out The Great Delusion by Mearsheimer.
We need to embrace realism just like how a chess player needs to think several moves ahead if he wants to win. You highlight how Option B, the 'most moral' option is unacceptable due to the potential for global catastrophe. It's the least moral option. Once you see that you start to understand why we need realism to achieve realistic goals in the most efficient and least costly way.
J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
"Fragile flower Katie Dolatowski, 6'5", was rightly sent to a women's prison in Scotland after conviction. This ensured she was protected from violent, predatory men (unlike the 10-year-old girl Katie sexually assaulted in a women's public bathroom.)"
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
Just last month the national force said it was no longer able to investigate every "low level" crime, including some cases of theft and criminal damage.
It has, however, pledged to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives.
BBC News understands that these will be assessed by a "dedicated team" within Police Scotland including "a number of hate crime advisers" to assist officers in determining what, if any, action to take.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Doesn't this just establish how Chaotic Evil the US is as a political entity?
George W. Bush (the hanging chad to Trump's virgin 'unlawful means') invaded Iraq with a lie, recklessly oversaw a pointless, insane war in Afghanistan. He has rivers of blood on his hands, a good chunk of it American. How many US soldiers have killed themselves from their pointless service in his pointless, retarded wars? But this is all Presidential and Acceptable so he gets off scot-free. The most anyone thinks of it is when he makes a Freudian slip in the standard anti-Putin diatribe and suffers a little embarrassment:
Instead, while criticising Russia’s political system, he said: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.
“I mean, of Ukraine,” he said quickly.
He then said “Iraq too” to laughter from the crowd.
Is it a mask-off moment? Is there even a mask?
Trump... moved some documents about that he shouldn't have? Had his supporters come into the Capitol where they were shot at and then left peacefully once they turned on the announcement system telling them to leave? And this is the most awful and terrible thing to ever happen to US democracy? This is the man who needs to go to prison, out of all living US presidents?
What kind of insane world is this? Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize before he even did anything, back in 2009 'for fostering nuclear non-proliferation and reaching out to the Muslim World'. He then preceded to wreck Libya. He should've been getting Nobel Prizes for War or Destruction of Functioning Countries.
This reminds me of Nixon too. Nixon could bomb Laos into oblivion without any approval for war and that was totally fine, apparently. It happened before and after Nixon too, it's basically standard practice. Yet Nixon authorizes somebody to break into a journalist's apartment and that's just beyond the pale? It's a parody of justice, anarcho-tyranny on a grotesque scale.
It's not even Chaotic Evil where one is unabashed and upfront about doing whatever one pleases. It's Chaotic Evil dressed up as Lawful Good, how the US is some noble Paladin defending the Rules-Based International Order (though just what those Rules are is never made clear, for obvious reasons). 'Wink wink, nudge, nudge, the International Criminal Court is based in one of our vassal states and if that's not enough, we'll invade the Hague the moment a US service member is brought there.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
Is there anything superfluous that could be left out?” “Everything—see above."
This is what real power looks like, when you're totally unaccountable and see no reason to justify your beliefs. 'It's current_year' is another example. Or 'We hold these truths to be self-evident'.
If you don't provide an explanation for why you believe something is true and just imply questioning you is unacceptable, then you don't have a leg to stand on in terms of logic and reason. Instead, it shows that your basis in ideological, social power is very strong.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
Approximately none. Black on white violence isn't uncommon and doesn't generate much in the way of outrage at all.
The above is the complete reverse of the above, except the white kid is 12 here. Race is not mentioned at all, though it shows the picture of the perpetrator.
Or another more blatant case of racial hatred: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nbc-abc-cbs-and-cnn-show-zero-results-for-reports-on-the-5-year-old-white-child-allegedly-executed-by-black-25-year-old-neighbor
Snopes shot back, saying that nbc, CNN and ABC did write articles about the murder, albeit after the above article was written. Even so, note the headlines they give:
"A 25-year-old man has been charged in the shooting death of 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant" (CNN)
"5-year-old shot to death in North Carolina; suspect sought" (The Associated Press)
"Authorities capture suspect in 5-year-old's fatal shooting" (The Associated Press)
"Motive a Mystery in 5-Year-Old's Murder" (NBC New York and NBC Boston).
"Funeral planned for 5-year-old boy shot at point-blank range in N.C."(NBC12 in Richmond, Virginia).
"Wilson man wanted in fatal shooting of 5-year-old apprehended" (WRAL-TV, an NBC-affiliated station, in Raleigh).
"'He meant the world to me': Family, friends honor life of Cannon Hinnant, the 5-year-old boy shot and killed while riding bike in Wilson" (ABC11 in Raleigh).
"5-year-old shot and killed while outside on bike, 25-year-old charged with murder" (ABC7 in Los Angeles).
"Funeral, vigil scheduled for Cannon Hinnant, the 5-year-old boy killed in North Carolina" (ABC6 in Philadelphia).
"Boy, 5, 'shot dead by neighbour' as he played with sisters" (Yahoo! News)
I took a quick look through half the above articles, they do not mention race in the text though they might show images of the victim and the accused. Now compare to the headlines for this incident from OP's links:
CNN: "Accused shooter in Kansas City shooting of Black teen who went to the wrong house is White man in his 80s"
Kansas City Defender: “This Is A Hate Crime”: Kansas City Black Family Demanding Justice After A White Man Shoots Black Boy, Ralph Yarl, In The Head Twice For Ringing Doorbell Of The Wrong Home, White Man Released By Police Hours Later
(it's like one of those light novels that tells the whole story in the title!)
NBC: Lawyers for Black teenager shot after ringing wrong doorbell criticize release of man who opened fire
NYT: Family calls for charges in shooting of black teenager in Kansas City...
Kansas City Star: Ralph Yarl released from hospital and recovering at home in Kansas City, father says
This article doesn't mention race but links to a fair few from the same newspaper that do. Anyway, there's breathless coverage and racial spin for this white-kills-black story in the majority press (Washington Examiner and similar excepted) while the earlier black-kills-white story gets slow-walked and purged of any racial element. This is not what you'd expect from a country where a minority, blacks, kills proportionately vastly more of the majority, whites, than whites kill of blacks. Naively, people would assume that bigger trends get bigger coverage. This is clearly not the case.
While the conflict is unsightly, the economic policy of 'lets continuously cut taxes and raise spending' is Zimbabwe-tier. America cannot afford to treat the rest of the world like retarded clowns forever, no matter how stupid and foolish other countries are. They're not going to keep buying these little bits of paper at a high price. Bond rates have been and will continue to rise.
A trillion dollars borrowed every 180 days? Inflation will inevitably spike and then interest rates will need to be raised, with serious consequences for refinancing. US is already at 124% debt to GDP, there's not much more room to borrow.
There are lots of people on the MAGA-right who don't seem to care about this at all, just the political impossibility of cutting spending. Being bankrupt isn't great politically either. Inflationary spirals aren't great either. Schizo tariff wars with the rest of the world... aren't great either. Trump and some of his key advisors have basically no concept of what it means to run the economy, they are not economically literate. It's like Soviet politburo members in the 1980s who had no idea how the Soviet economy actually ran, the complex dual-currency system that existed to prevent inflation. They had no concept of inflation. The Biden administration was little better, they did much the same thing. But one fundamentally can't expect loyalty from others if one flails around breaking things constantly in a position of power.
Reminds me a bit of the UK, how they just elected Labour. After 14 years of the Tory clownshow, people wanted something new. Starmer seemed normal enough.
And what did they get? The same as before. The Tories were flailing around pretending to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and not actually doing it. Starmer cut the Rwanda facade. Mass immigration continues either way, regardless of Brexit or anything else.
The Tories were perceived as pursuing relentless austerity cuts. Lo and behold, Starmer is continuing in their footsteps, announcing a 22 billion pound black hole that needs to be fixed up with tax hikes. There are starting to be these wailing posts from Labour hopefuls who credulously expected hope and change, only to get yet another serving of decline: https://x.com/D_Blanchflower/status/1827688405632761960
British steel industry under the Tories? Dying. Under Labour? Dead. Tories soft on crime? Labour will be as soft or softer: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/26/violent-offenders-increasingly-let-off-with-apology/
More than 147,000 people accused of offences including sex crimes, violence and weapons possession were given community resolutions in the year to March instead of being prosecuted. Such resolutions do not result in a criminal record.
The surge comes amid a deepening crisis in the criminal justice system. Prisons are so full that the Government is releasing thousands of criminals early next month in the wake of the riots, while police have raised concerns that any worsening of jail overcrowding could limit their ability to make arrests.
I suspect that if Kamala is elected, people are going to quickly sour as the impressions they absorbed prove ethereal. It'll be more of the same. Just like Trump in 2017, a lot of people were really fired up about draining the swamp but it never actually happened. A lot of people wanted something more than tax cuts and didn't get it. The machinery is already in place, the ship steers very slowly if you can even find the controls.
Isn’t the fact that race doesn’t exist genetically enough to largely settle the debate regarding race and IQ?
Makes we want to scream. Of course it's genetic! Even if we had zero knowledge of genetics, even if we were in 1000 BC we understood that race was hereditarian, that if you had a big Gaul breed with a small Malayan you'd probably get an in-between sized, half-Gaul, half-Malayan with South-Asian and European facial features.
I was taught in university that of course race doesn't exist and in the next few sentences the teacher was talking about how some populations were more or less vulnerable to sickle-cell anemia or their bone marrow was different. Hmm... What does she think race means, what is the use of the word? Is it really impossible for them to see through these word games, or are they knowingly lying?
Saying that race isn't genetic today, when we can look at haplogroups... it's like denying the colour blue just because you can't justify the exact nanometer blue turns to green. Or we could look at breeds of dog with remarkably different sizes and behaviours, aligning with heredity (and thus genetics)!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.
OK, we've lost some money from dumb economic policy. I've lost money, you've lost money. Stocks down. Schizo tariff policy is dumb.
But is this really worse than what the experts were cooking up in terms of DEI, mass immigration and green economics? Australia has been in an economic meltdown, GDP per capita fell bigly. Housing is massively unaffordable. No politicians have any answers except more plans to pump housing prices even higher, subsidizing first-home buyers. The ponzi marches on! The European economies have been wrecked by the EU. Britain is still being wrecked. Canada has been stagnating, universities turned to degree-mills, massive immigration, houses unaffordable, wages inadequate...
Why is it that schizo tariff policy is worse than deliberate, considered, orderly wrecking of the economy? Is it that famous quote from the Joker?
"Nobody panics when things go 'according to plan.' Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all 'part of the plan.' But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!"
And I haven't even mentioned the social problems caused by these policies! London is what, 30% English? Isn't the capital of England supposed to be English? Isn't Birmingham supposed to have garbage picked up, it's supposed to be a rich industrial city, not a shithole? Aren't Western countries supposed to be high-trust societies? Isn't it bad when Biden brings millions of migrants into the US?
Trump is not perfect and he probably can't solve many if any of the challenges the US faces, while likely making many things worse. But the other side is fully committed to making things worse, they've worked hard on it and see it as virtuous. I consider DEI, expensive energy and mass migration as core policies of the mainstream right and left, everyone besides Trump and Trump-adjacent figures. As far as I'm concerned, these are bad policies.
Respectable, moderate, reasonable, orderly German centrists are working to raise the price of petrol and diesel and make workers poorer: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/incoming-german-government-from-hell
Chancellor-hopeful Friedrich Merz confirmed that “many workers will have less net income … in the coming years” due to social welfare contributions – particularly pension, health insurance and long-term care insurance payments. He also openly admitted that his party, the CDU, had failed to secure the tax relief for workers on which they had campaigned, because of “disagreement” with the Social Democrats. And when the interviewer asked him to confirm again that this means Germans “will … have less net income … because social welfare contributions are rising, but taxes are not falling,” Merz agreed that “these concerns are certainly not unjustified.”
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.
Really sounds like Oceantech is just a big grift. What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work? 'Not inspiring' might well be code for 'knows what he's doing and wouldn't touch our work with a barge pole'.
Couldn't agree more about the unsuitability of 'move fast and break things' in areas with big downsides. Most software is non-critical, yet stuff like AI or bioweapons/gain-of-function should be treated with extreme care. But it's not just Silicon Valley that is to blame - random research groups like EcoHealth and so on messed up bigtime.
RationalWiki has to be one of the most cringeworthy sites around.
Everything is written with the kind of contemptuous, snarky tone that you see on the incels.wiki page for 'femoids'. At least the incels are succinct.
For instance, on the Vladimir Putin page for instance they have "Reality-defying good stuff?" and "And the reality-returning bad stuff" as sections. 'Elderly imperialist Elmer Fudd and Daniel Craig’s evil twin.' is not an appropriate subtitle for an image.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.
At the risk of strawmanning or picking out particularly egregious commentators, there is a genuine lack of agricultural awareness. Recall the fellow who remarked on the pretty inexplicable patterns in the countryside from his aircraft: https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1190737140688326656
A more serious and tragic example is the Sri Lankan government banning fertilizer, leading to an economic disaster: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/
Perhaps instead of raising awareness of mental health or climate change, there should be awareness-raising of the importance of fertilizer in agriculture, of the need to produce nitrates and various pesticidal chemicals in factories, of the need for cheap energy supplies to sustain industrial civilization?
'The gamer word'
Is that needed here of all places? We're not on reddit anymore. The considerable efforts of the admins are wasted if nobody uses the fruits of their labour, one of which is use of language that would rack up bad-boy points on other websites regardless of context.
Far be it for me to police the language of a post about language-policing but really, if we're talking about the word 'nigger' then this should be made clear.
As a more substantive point, the donations for both Karmelo Anthony and Shiloh's have both been censored now, though this hasn't stopped people doing the funny 'make username of N' trick to spell out nigger that 4chan loves so much. Some of the comments: https://x.com/tsarlet2/status/1918360755977748550
Clearly givesendgo wanted to suppress that kind of thing while retaining a certain perception of even handedness. There was plenty of time to censor the 'fuck white people' genre of donation comments earlier.
Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Or:
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
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