2rafa
5hr ago
The only way for Europe to truly challenge America right now is to drop Ukraine, make big overtures toward Russia, get closer to China (nuclear option would be lifting ASML export restrictions to the PRC, since no US company can compete with them). Then Trump is in an unenviable position. He can wield the might of the US financial system to try to destroy the European and Chinese economies but that’s an extremely high variance play that would unite the US’ main geopolitical competitors in a way that could destroy dollar hegemony.
If he wants Greenland, instead of the current fumbling, he can just threaten Novo exports until the Danes agree to a referendum, then bribe the natives. Alas, that would require a somewhat more intentional foreign policy.
Yes, but in an unusual and interesting way, since it would allow the Europeans to get concession from Russia on Ukraine to the extent that an American presence might no longer be necessary to achieve a ‘frozen line’ peace there, and because if done quickly and stealthily enough, the US would have to commit to a shooting and bombing war against Russian troops, not proxies, in a way that has never really happened absent a couple of edge cases since the 1950s.
2rafa
5hr ago
The status quo is increasingly untenable, and I’d like to see the necessary changes happen before AI takes over everything and makes every single conflict potentially species-ending.
2rafa
20hr ago
Denmark should offer Putin a base in Greenland next to America’s and see how Trump reacts.
2rafa
20hr ago
The Europeans have the opportunity to do the funniest thing here and start negotiating a Russian presence in Greenland (since the only reason America would even want the island is to counter Russia).
Alas, at the behest of the neurotic Baltics, traumatized Poles, and what passes for British foreign policy, playing hardball is anathema to the Europeans for now.
2rafa
20hr ago
Europeans will riot if you abolish the welfare state. It can only happen like Greece during the crisis (although there were still plenty of riots then) where there’s no money and the government says it’s this or we starve. Even the French aren’t there yet.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s a current trend on TikTok / Instagram to post pictures of yourself from 2016. Next month, in early February, we will celebrate our own 10th anniversary of the Culture War Thread. What are we doing to mark the occasion?
2rafa
1d ago
It’s the best his writing has been since the pandemic, but that’s because he’s writing on one of his favorite topics which is being mean to himself and his audience. The reason his writing declined elsewhere was that he was and hopefully is mostly happily and so didn’t really care to the same extent. Even a long past their best singer can put on a quality performance of their greatest hits.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s not that there are no cases of successful gunboat diplomacy; there are. But as the British found out when they tried it, in a lot of cases that road leads to boots on the ground, flag on a flagpole imperialism anyway, because the threat of intervention has to be backed up or because the people you put or keep in power need help.
2rafa
3d ago
There’s nothing I can add other than to reiterate @Corvos and @orthoxerox’s replies. Because classical systems still involve effective, consistent multigenerational meritocracy (ie social mobility), they effectively offer almost the same competence with a huge reduction in unnecessary make-work. Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise. Yes, you are impatient, but that is more about you than it is about society.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens. My mother’s family were a mix of middle class for many decades. My father’s family were a mix of shtetl dwellers and Italian Jews who mostly arrived between the 1820s (early for Ashkenazim) and 1890s (with a few later outliers), and who went on to make and lose several fortunes, but who were at the time of his birth as middle class as you can get (think a small town accountant or government worker).
Ivy entrance rates back in the day were pretty generous and you could still get a solid thumb on the scale. The exams were hard, but they relied on knowledge of things like Greek and Latin and Classical Civilization that the working classes just didn’t have. Plus there’s that efficiency thing, people back then didn’t even think of applying if they weren’t already ‘in’.
2rafa
4d ago
Iraq actually went rather well by these standards. And it's still shit.
Iraq is doing about as well as a non-GCC Arab country can do for now. Judged against its peers, it’s got good growth, a functioning economy with real median income having increased a lot in the last decade, and as a basket case of ethnic tensions between Sunni Arabs, Shias and Kurds it’s being vaguely held together with comparatively minimal violence.
In general though I agree with your point.
2rafa
4d ago
Rubio’s family left before communism, although it’s an open question whether that matters given he’s so strongly identified himself with the exiles from communism.
2rafa
4d ago
I have a ‘special test’ where I ask an LLM a series of questions about the ancestors of semi-prominent political figures from multiple third world non-English speaking countries. Stuff like “tell me about Xi Jinping’s great grandparents”, but for people much less prominent than him.
At the start, they would hallucinate all the time. Then, they became firmer about saying “there’s no information”. Then, they became a little better about finding and translating obscure foreign language sources and gleaning little bits of data from them. Now they’re really good at this, but the hallucination / BS frequency seems to have gone back up slightly.
2rafa
4d ago
Undoubtedly but asylum alone isn’t the answer, huge numbers of Iranians emigrated and it’s easy for Iranians to claim asylum in Europe (or it was for a very long time anyway), but it didn’t stop a long history of protest.
2rafa
5d ago
The Iranian regime is built to survive. As a result of the unique story of its emergence and the very unlikely survival of the movement in the face of both the Iraq-Iran war and the (initially) much larger socialist/student/Tudeh movement that it and its predecessor(s) utterly crushed, the IRGC is one of the most competent military bodies in the world if you consider its primary purpose the pacification of the Iranian people.
Khomeini understood that the bourgeois class would never fully support an Islamist revolution. Unlike various historical socialist revolutionaries, though, he realized that at least some of them were necessary for the economic survival of the state. He therefore set in motion a series of events that would lead to them being policed, essentially, by the sons of the devout lower middle-class, often semi-rural (but occasionally urban or rural) who would form the nexus of the IRGC and be utterly loyal to the clerical class (without whom they would go back to being nobodies). The IRGC would enrich itself, but never quite to the extent of e.g. the Egyptian or Pakistani military states, where military control of the economy is so absolute that the private sector is entirely subordinate to it in most industries.
In general, if you look at the big 3 US ‘axis of evil’ states still around, they each have a different relationship to popular protest. North Korea has almost none, not only because of the absoluteness of ideological surveillance and the ubiquitous East German style custom of informing on neighbors but because the people are completely ideologically indoctrinated into dynastic worship of the Kim family. Cuba has middling protests every 25 years where one or two people get killed and someone prominent resigns or apologizes but the regime is never under serious threat; Cubans are too lazy for revolution and those smart and ambitious enough to try it either rise within the Party or flee to America.
Only Iran actually has regular violent protests; unlike the Cubans or North Koreans, they have real, serious interest in regime change. But the IRGC is a well oiled machine with no loyalty to the protestors, and it just keeps gunning them down, hundreds a day, until order is restored. Life in Iran is bad but not hell, and to the domestic middle and upper middle classes, with their email jobs and social media, this is not worth dying over. That is why the regime stands a good chance of surviving in some form.
2rafa
5d ago
Within hours of the strikes mainstream western press was quoting experts saying, basically “this would have delayed them by a few months at the most; the most valuable facilities are dispersed and too deep underground”, so I don’t think this is accurate.
2rafa
6d ago
Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.
2rafa
6d ago
All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.
In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.
2rafa
7d ago
The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
2rafa
7d ago
It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.
The radical left has always thought this. It’s why communist states are always democracies except that various groups of people can’t vote because they’re reactionaries and of course the party has to approve every candidate to make sure no counterrevolutionaries slip through against the will of the people, obviously.
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