JTarrou
16hr ago
Because that's the historical dispensation of the modern left. There is a conservation of tribalism, people just move the groups around and emphasize identities to fit the current fashion. There is the exact same tension in the discussion of "white people's" wealth and the disparities between average whites and asians, jews, indians etc. All the structural advantages that supposedly keep the black man down in favor of the white man wind up disproportionately benefitting nonwhite or marginally white groups?
It's all just a conspiracy theory, essentially.
When faced with inequality of criminality, condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men, and definitely don't enforce the current firearm laws harshly against that group specifically. Then, complain about different men and different guns to the ones causing the problem.
When faced with inequality of income, condemn whites and men. But not the most disproportionately wealthy groups which are no white supremacist's idea of a good time. Also no one can define "men".
It's all just a grand unified theory of white male christian hatred that explains all differential outcomes for everyone else, but only when the comparison is negative. It shifts blame from the political ingroup to the outgroup.
All this despite the obvious logical problems and the messiness of all the categories involved. This is the theology that holds the modern left together, the unified hatred of the modern global economy ("capitalism"), Realpolitik, Western civilization broadly, white people specifically, and of course men.
The progressive stack is always topped by whatever is fashionably considered the biggest opponent of these general categories. Global Warming, No Kings, Free Palestine, Pussy hats, BLM, NAFTA, MeToo, Nuclear Power, the Soviet Union, Iran etc.
The right has all the same things in places, but due to the class gap it's more drunk tradesmen and internet edgelords than senators and ivy league college presidents.
JTarrou
2d ago
Not sure if this was intended for me, but I'll take a crack.
Male advantages increase as the sport more closely resembles what sports aspire to replace. In soccer? Female skill and conditioning could overmatch untrained males. Grappling? Not nearly as much. MMA? Even less.
The closer you get to actual combat, the premium on male advantages rise and compound. Very athletic women average ~150lb. The average adult male is 200. On average, a top female athlete is giving up fifty pounds to the untrained joe.
JTarrou
2d ago
No women's team in any sport has ever defeated a U-15 boys team at anything except whinging about not getting paid enough for that level of play. The equality comparison must be lowered. Shall we compromise on thirteen?
What percentage of thirteen-year-old boys do you think the average untrained adult male could whip in a fight?
JTarrou
3d ago
Do you mean to tell me if the woman trains for a couple years, and is healthy / responsive to training, she wouldn't be stronger than the majority of men that don't train, or are just fooling around in the gym / not really progressively overloading?
Yes. Same thing for fighting.
The best female athletes in the world across a variety of sports roughly equal the athletic performance of ten to twelve year old boys. That's the general physical capability of extreme female athletes.
JTarrou
3d ago
What insightful commentary. Do go on.
Trump killed a civilization with a tweet. Hysterical. Chuck Norris jokes as political analysis.
JTarrou
3d ago
The final resting place of TDS: acceptance that it was just aesthetic snobbery all along. The greatest political actor in the US since FDR, vanquished both parties, slew the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, co-opted the Kennedies, rewrote the political playbook and realigned the party system, the international treaty system and US policies more generally. One day they'll probably teach this little banger in 300-level poly-sci classes, in the same chapter as the Fireside Chats.
So gauche!
JTarrou
8d ago
Let me tell the skeleton of a similar story about a good friend of mine. He's a bright guy, pharmacist by trade, musically inclined. Got hooked up with a real psycho. Not "omg my ex is craaaazy", real-deal double digit involuntary commitments, full bore diagnosed and sentenced bipolar. She's cute but not that cute, a solid 6 or 7 on a good day, kinda mousy. The kind of girl who ruins every event she attends by having a very public meltdown, taking bizarre offense to everyone and everything, and clinging to my buddy like he's the only white man and they're on safari.
Nobody liked this bitch, not his friends, not his family, not one single person in his life, and we told him. Luckily he dumped her after a couple months. We threw him a party on the theme of "ding dong, the witch is dead". We got him set up with new dates. They were back together in a month. They would break up and get back together a dozen or so times over the next five years. They had a kid, a lawsuit over custody and child support. Then they got back together, had another kid, got married. Then they separated, got back together, lasted a few more years before getting divorced and what does my genius friend do?
Knocks her up one more time after the divorce was filed.
Now he has to pay her mortgage and see this woman twice a week for the next twelve years, eighteen from when they split.
You can try to suss some deep social thing from this, but my guy had options. He had warnings, blatant and flashing. He was sane and smart enough to understand, he wasn't tricked or coerced. He had other women interested. Some part of her crazy just matched up right with his crazy and he couldn't stop going back to her. He had to be getting something out of it, I figure.
People are bad at relationships, and a lot of us are lying to ourselves about what we actually want and are actually willing to tolerate. I don't think that's an indictment of any higher organization than the people inside the relationship. That said, I think our social models of lifelong partnerships are pretty stunted in popular culture.
JTarrou
14d ago
No, but Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer.
He might even be right this time, but it would only be by chance.
JTarrou
14d ago
Devereaux is an interesting thinker on ancient history. On modern military matters, he's useless. Where Trump is involved, actively anti-intelligent. Put him with Dan Carlin, if you're looking for another historian eaten by the TDS.
Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better. We'll find out in a year or ten whether it was a success.
JTarrou
14d ago
Israel is ~20% muslim arab palestinian, with full civil rights, representation in the Knesset and socioeconomic outcomes above average.
What you're calling an "ethnostate" is only because palestinians and jews are the same ethnicity.
What you're calling "apartheid" is the former residents of Jordanian and Egyptian occupied territory, which were never given citizenship nor a homeland by their former overlords either. And because Israel won't resettle an armed and hostile people who live beyond its borders within its borders, you call it apartheid. Every nation on earth that isn't resettling terrorist groups inside their country is an "apartheid state" by this measure.
JTarrou
17d ago
I saw a tweet to the effect of:
"I bought this before I knew he was a Nazi" bumper sticker on
1: A tesla - shitlib
2: A Ford - troll
3: A Volkswagen - legend
JTarrou
17d ago
1: Take 245 million and live like John MacAfee
2: Pay five hundred academics ten grand each to say that all my pronouncements are True Marxism.
JTarrou
19d ago
"Lying to investigators" is how the FBI, which to this day refuses to record interviews, frames people directly. You can't defend yourself, it's your word against the interviewer, who doesn't even write down notes as he goes, but writes it all down a few days after the interview, from "memory". They can literally write anything they want, and there is no recourse. Congratulations on your confession to 9/11.
JTarrou
21d ago
There may be a doctor shortage, but there is no shortage of medical knowledge. All you are seeing is the artificial scarcity of the medical cartel, which restricts the credentialing institutions to enforce a shortage, increasing wages for credentialed doctors. This, however, is a dying model. My three-step solution:
1: Reducing the time, cost and eliminating the corrupt bottleneck of medical school. Break the AMA, streamline and prune the academic curricula, and Bob's your uncle.
2: AI. Current chatbots are probably medically superior in diagnosis to the average doctor available to the average american. This will only improve. The vast majority of doctor visits could probably be a pic uploaded to an app on your phone, with results in minutes and your prescription auto-ordered.
3: Crush the inevitable revolt of the doctors and all their stakeholders.
JTarrou
27d ago
There's an alternate history where America winds up allied to the Iranian Shia coalition instead of the Turkish/Saudi/Egyptian Sunni one. I'm not sure that world is any more peaceful, but the Shia generally are less trouble than the far more numerous and expansionist Sunni.
I have a lot of respect for the Iranian people and their ability to organize. I have a lot of respect for Persian culture and their long and fractious history. There's a reason it's so unstable, and it is largely the result of tribal loyalties and clan-based societies. In this respect, the Iranians are no different from the Arabs.
Aesthetically is an entirely different story.
JTarrou
28d ago
Too many violent offenses, not enough prisons.
The only solutions are death, corporal punishment, mass prison construction or what we're doing now, which is catch and release.
There are some other options, but they generally fall under "cruel and unusual", at least according to current lawyers.
JTarrou
28d ago
Most "modern democracies" are vassal states (allies) of the US, forbidden to fight anyone without our approval, and most of those have divested themselves of any real military capability. This was not done through democratic means. Our forefathers knew democracies had spent the last century invading each other, especially the French. When they set up the postwar system, the EU gave up its essential sovereignty in military terms to the US. So they could all be peaceful "democracies" under the aegis of US military protection. So too with Japan and South Korea. They aren't peaceful, they're disarmed. When they weren't, as in the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, they immediately fell into wars until the US asserted military supremacy over eastern europe.
Yes, being the global military guarantor of the trade routes routinely requires military action in far-flung parts of the world. Especially against regimes that have aligned themselves politically against your hegemony. This is something every superpower has to do, because that's what allows the entire global economy that has lifted our race of humanity from the endemic poverty of 99.999999% of our collective history. Some do better jobs than others. If you want to compare the US empire, compare it to the constellation of other great powers who ran it before us. Is our middle east policy really worse than France, Russia and Britain's? Was theirs worse than Spain and Portugal's? Or the Ottomans?
Actually, the Ottomans might have been the last great empire to have a better middle eastern policy, but nobody's going for the "Use Albanian slaves to crush all resistance" tactic anymore.
JTarrou
29d ago
The first casualty of war is truth, they say. War covers a multitude of sins. That's one of the reasons people like them. If you think you're going to get some clear-cut war like the "good ol days", you missed the second half of the twentieth century. War is fought in the media, everyone is lying. Trump is lying about Iran, Clinton was lying about Kosovo, Bush was lying about Iraq, Kennedy was lying about Vietnam.
JTarrou
29d ago
All depends on when you start the clock, I suppose. If you think the war started in 2026 versus 1979 versus 1953 versus 1952 for instance.
JTarrou
29d ago
Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.
JTarrou
29d ago
I think you're just completely misreading what's happening. The US touch overseas is lightening, not tightening. Kidnapping heads of state is orders of magnitude more complex, difficult and lower casualty than a bombing campaign. The previous Iran bombing campaign, very targeted, very precise, little in the way of collateral. The current run is certainly higher volume and less precise, as any escalation must necessarily be. But that isn't the tale of a US government obsessed with "lethality", much the opposite. You've got one or two out of thousands upon thousands of missions and millions of bits of ordnance to complain about.
JTarrou
29d ago
The Gulf states will be angry with Iran, but will ultimately draw closer with it out of necessity.
Could you explain this? The US is helping the Sunni nations of the middle east, which are in the midst of a multi-decade project of ethnic cleansing and religious persecution intended to remove all minority groups from their "Ummah". Iran, which has been trying for decades to out-anti-US the arab street, has been left in the lurch when the Sunni nations moved toward the US and Israel. This is why Iran green-lit the Oct 7th assault, negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is why Iran is just raining missiles on anyone and everyone around the gulf who isn't the US and Israel. And this approach is going to bring the Sunni and Shia together again?
Seems counterintuitive, say more.
JTarrou
29d ago
The US could easily beat Iran and rule it as long as we wanted, in military terms. In political terms, it's entirely impossible to do with a "democracy" of oligarchs who will change policies at the drop of a hat if the media whines a little.
JTarrou
29d ago
Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike? War happens. All this struggle session about it is lame.
Let me just get this out there. When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers. If you're very (un)lucky, you'll be facing a world superpower with good enough targeting to keep that ratio low. In a standard conventional military without smart munitions, the civvy/oppo ratio exceeds 5:1 for conventional operations and 10:1 for irregular warfare. Which is why irregular combatants are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.
This is what war is. There are, ultimately, no rules to the war game. Anyone cherry picking the one-off mistakes of any country in an armed conflict is doing so for their own reasons, not some established corpus of imaginary "international law" of which they seem to be the only lawyers.
I don't see this as the important part, but I mean all the various minority groups that outperform the white average. Jews are a central example, but east asians, indians, nigerians, arabs etc.
Equivocation between whether jews are the oppressed victims of the holocaust or the perpetrators of a current one is a perennial favorite. It's different things. The left doesn't like right-wing nationalistic jews (Israelis), but they do like western communist jews who never went to Israel to try their stupid ideas. Often the second group are protesting the first. Meanwhile the right understands a nationalistic western-oriented regional ally, but isn't that fond of the "jooos" in NYC and Berkeley. It's just politics, and the requisite belief systems thereof.
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