4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
23d ago
Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
23d ago
Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated
The standard theory is that as Reds get rich and educated, they overwhelmingly turn Blue all by themselves. It's not like this is unique to the US, either - the educated are high-openness globalists just about everywhere. How do you figure this would be the result of a deliberate Blue ploy, like "make sure" seems to suggest?
I think more than LARP, it's a materialization of the worst of the kayfabe politics that have been spreading everywhere. The idea behind the wording is to suggest that the US has something like anime demon powers where they go "I said KNEEL" and then the lower-powerlevel figures just find their legs buckling for some reason. Of course the US greatly benefits from the perception that it does have those powers, but it doesn't actually have them, and one failed attempt to use them would forever establish common knowledge that it is so and destroy the resistance-is-futile dividend in all future conflicts even against smaller fry. Therefore it finds itself in the awkward situation of having to convince the public that it obviously could do that, but now is not the right time.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
24d ago
Yes, and I think the "her boyfriend is evil/abusive (but she was still staying with him until I came along) and I am much better so surely she wouldn't cheat on me, a much better man" sentiment is part of the trope as well. We need to be careful how much we buy into American propaganda about the Taliban being an unpopular dictatorship - of course they would say that because "we're not invading, we're bringing liberty to oppressed peoples" is an important part of their narrative. The actual observations, including the evident low enthusiasm of most Afghans to defend the American-installed government, the doggedness with which the Taliban and their supporters continued fighting and the ease with which they reestablished themselves after the US withdrawal, as well as the continuous trickle of information about the depravity the US had to enable to keep at least a portion of local elites committed to their cause, is really quite consistent with the Taliban having a Mandate of Heaven over Afghanistan.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
25d ago
I don't think there has to be a reasonable and coherent thought process. It's tempting to think something like "Islam bad and crazy, so anti-Islam ought to be good and sane", but the reality seems to be that being a sufficiently dedicated dissident against a well-entrenched ethno-religious memeplex is rather positively correlated with psychological issues. The n=3 most actively anti-CCP overseas Chinese I knew were so obviously schizophrenic that in one case even the generic soy-enjoying progressive mutual friend warned me about this before introducing them, and in the ideologically more integrated 1970s West one of the main streams of dissidents were people who took the Illuminatus! trilogy seriously.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
25d ago
On one hand, betraying people who you enticed to betray their country to collaborate with you and who risked life and limb to do so seems absolutely dishonourable and shameful, and I don't see how the short-term win and red meat to your base will offset the loss of soft power (and, concretely, the greater difficulty to recruit local cronies in future adventures). Arguably, being perfidious towards its vassals played a part in the ultimate downfall of the British empire; one would think the Americans could have learned a lesson from that.
On the other, there is the old adage that "if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you, bro", so perhaps the US is to some extent justified in looking at those collaborators with disdain.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
25d ago
Why can't the whole anchor baby issue just be solved by saying that the existence of citizen children will not be considered as a factor in immigration enforcement against the parents? If the children are US citizens but do not have a guardian who can legally exercise their role in the US, they should just be treated the same way that the underage children of someone who is sent to prison would be, i.e. placed in a foster home. This seems way more legally watertight.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
25d ago
I'm pretty sure they were also saying 200 years ago "our grandchildren are going to be burdened by paying off this debt!" Somehow the bill hasn't come due yet, but maybe our grandkids will finally be the time
Has it not? Per Wikipedia, the US spent about 14% of its total federal budget on debt servicing in 2023, or 726 billion per year. Put differently, everyone's taxes could be 14% lower if you were not paying off the debt. This seems nontrivial, especially for businesses that operate on slim margins.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
25d ago
Yeah, I think this is something that gets neglected frequently in the /r/CredibleDefense-style discourse of how an EU entry into the war would play out. There is a meaningful sense in which the current arrangement, in which the EU functions as a safe logistical and industrial base for Ukraine that could enter the war but hasn't, is stronger in the long run than one in which it participates in earnest - for starters, the Ukrainian power grid largely is still somewhat operational only because attacking Ukrainian nuclear power plants is an EU red line (the non-nuclear ones are already largely out of operation, and the grid itself has a lot more redundancy); and there's the Polish and Romanian staging areas right across the border, and recon flights peeking across the border from EU airspace.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
I think equating unequal application of rules with corruption is motte-and-bailey, or at least a case of the noncentral fallacy. Corruption evokes images like taking bribes or passing an answer key to a certification exam to ideological allies; this is probably much more rare.
Most cases of rules applied unequally do not feel like you are making biased decisions about applying the rules from the inside - instead, you figure that it is an intended part of the rules that you get to apply discretion, because reality is complicated, and it just so happens that certain cases have a lot of highly valid extenuating circumstances. The outgroup screams that you are applying the rules unequally, but you know they just do this because they are moral mutants and hate the people who deserve discretionary mercy the most. (Everyone here knows examples of when the Blue Tribe does this anyway, so I'll just point out a Red version, which is squeezing of public figures over past sexual indiscretions (ex: Kavanaugh))
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
the government's deficit is the private sector's surplus, which most people find desirable and wouldn't want to cut.
Citation needed? Every citizen is ultimately on the hook for the government's debts in one way or another. If you find it desirable, why not cut the middleman and increase corporate surplus by donating your money to a corporation directly?
So it's largely independent of the accident involving his family, and you figure the dad is already a "cuck" just because he is not against immigration?
You seem to have come back to a scenario that conveniently only fits your use of the term, too. To be a "cuck", do you specifically have to refuse acting against something that looks like an invasion?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
If your kid got run over by a young man (who have the highest odds of causing fatal accidents) and this was picked up by misandrist feminists, who would proceed to milk the hell out of it to fuel a campaign to raise the minimum driving age for men to 25, would periodically contact you to appear on their campaign trail, and called you a "cuck" if it turned out you were uninterested in their agenda, can you not imagine wishing that your kid had been run over by an old woman instead? Does that make you a "cuck"?
(On that matter, we don't even need to use driving as an example. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime. Are relatives of victims who are not on board with feminism cucks?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
Ah, so it was in the context of an accident. I think that sentiment is a lot more defensible than if we were talking about terrorism and other premeditated crime (as it sounded like from the context) - there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to assume that immigrants would cause fatal car accidents at a higher rate.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
That's an edgy take. Where do you get that quote from? I have only seen similar sentiments about third-party victims of terrorism, and it's not like the other side is not likewise full of anticipation for immigrant perpetrators whenever an attack happens (e.g. in the context of the most recent car terrorist case in Germany, which actually did turn out to be a middle-aged native). It's unsurprising that people don't actually care for the lives of random countrymen nearly as much as they care for political ammo.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
I don't think that they could build it overnight. Actually enriching the fissile material and building such a complex system still takes time - timelines on the internet for Japan to go nuclear range from 6 months to 1 year. Either way, even if they build them, what can they do? There is no obvious non-escalatory course for them to retaliate (what would they do? Nuke China's overseas bases in Djibouti or Cambodia?), and if Japan escalates in this scenario they would probably get nuked by China in earnest with nobody coming to help them.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
Well, I'd like to see an entity with any amount of influence that has that cardinal value...
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
Apart from some really out-there ones like unusually agreeable pheromones, my best guess would be that it involves rapport-building body language. There are at least two schools of analysing and optimising microexpressions to control another person's impression of you (police interrogators and pick-up artists), starting with trickery like "mimic their posture" or "cross your legs so that the upper of the legs points towards them" that is not particularly subtle but already below the level of what someone not deliberately paying attention would notice. If any of this is effective, it would make sense to me if top politicians are pretty heavily selected for natural aptitude at it. As with the two "trickery" examples, the most effective tricks may require physical presence and attuning to an individual target.
Much more likely he is just an ideological sympathiser and whole hearted admirer of Putin's raw power.
I think even this is going too far. At the height of the gaming culture war, pro-Gamergaters liked talking about "getting thrown in the pit with the rest of us", that is, the circumstance that disagreeing with their opposition on anything would in short order get you labelled a misogynistic pro-Trump Nazi incel no matter how small the disagreement was, and that when you found yourself shunned by polite society and welcomed by a set of misogynistic pro-Trump Nazi incels, it is very easy to think the latter might not be so bad, and to repay kindness, acceptance and affirmation with the same.
In the affect-loading game, confident and egotistical people especially pin their own node at plus infinity affect. All the Western media has spent the past 8 years trying their darndest to reinforce the Trump-Russia edge. Who says Trump himself should be immune? If he keeps being thrown in the pit with Russia, would we not expect him to come to feel that Russia is on his team?
(As an aside, I would be so relieved if Trump somehow actually aligned the US with Russia against China, so I could then side with the latter against the former. It's always hard to dodge allegations that I sympathise with the anti-US position due to having Russian roots.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
Glaring self-serving asymmetry there. The true ordering is: my rules, unfairly > my rules, fairly > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly. Can also be generalized: my bailey > my motte > your motte > your bailey.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
Hard to do more recent ones for opsec reasons, but as a schoolkid on a school newspaper I once somehow (fun story in itself, but unfortunately also an opsec issue) got to interview Otto Schily, then-minister of interior of Germany. Being your run-of-the-mill vaguely anarchy-sympathising student, I considered him a natural enemy, and he spouted nothing but the tritest platitudes on the subject of the interview, but I was enthralled in more or less exactly the LotR way (Wow. This kindly old man is so likeable. Surely he has $problem under control. I should just listen and thank him. Everything will be all right.) and completely failed to even try to question the non-answers. After it ended, I looked over my notes, reflected on the incongruous feeling that can only be described as afterglow, and wondered wtf just happened.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
Right, but will the Chinese interpret (and expect the Americans, and other observers, to interpret) Guam as American soil for this purpose? In a limited (non-MAD) nuclear exchange, it seems that optics/bystander moral buy-in would matter nontrivially for escalatory decisions, and accepting any civilian nuclear casualties in the Philippines (and of course fallout, which is still itself treated as beyond the moral pale to inflict upon someone) would surely, in descending order of confidence, (1) be seen as making China more deserving of retaliation in the eyes of third-party bystanders and (2) the same in the eyes of the American public. It would also put everyone else hosting American bases on high alert - Japan might grit its teeth and mostly sit out a Taiwan invasion, but how would that calculus change if it also had to make a snap decision between kicking the Americans out and having Okinawa nuked?
(On that matter, there is perhaps some argument that if the Chinese do prefer to fire a warning shot at American overseas bases, the Japanese ones would be preferable over the Philippine ones? In a CN-TW conflict scenario, Japanese hearts and minds would be as lost to the Chinese as Polish ones are to the Russians over RU-UA; the same can't be said of the Filipinos)
Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?
(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)
(edit:
What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
Is it so hard to imagine that it might be the first one, and he simply fumbled? One thing that it is easy to forget, or might get lost in translation, is that Zelenskiy is not a strong politician. I still remember when I saw his address to the Russian people, which he released when Russia first invaded, and realised just how little he fit the mold of any successful or competitive politician archetype in the Eastern Bloc (or elsewhere). He does not have the cold judgmental mien of old-school apparatchik types like Putin or Mishustin, nor the artificial boorish anger of the People's Tribune types like Zhirinovsky, nor the slick scammy '90s businessman aura of Medvedev or Poroshenko; instead, in that particular moment, I really couldn't see him as anything other than a tired middle-aged Slav who got interrupted during a shirtless solo grilling session at his dacha by a bunch of thugs with baseball bats. Next to hawkish Russian Telegram channels gleefully posting mugshots of gentle-faced Ukrainian pilots to declare them "annihilated", this was probably the saddest moment of the early days of the war for me.
Everything he has done seems consistent with having the best intentions at every turn while fate takes improbable turns from bad to worse, but not having the cunning or foresight to plan further than one step ahead, nor the latitude to assert himself over the multitude of forces that are constraining and threatening him, nor even the people skills to see through or even just resist all the natural politicians* that he is forced to play ball with, nor any superhuman mental fortitude. Unfortunately, almost everyone either subscribes to the Western propaganda picture of him as a brilliant Churchillian leader, or the Russian propaganda picture of him as a wily actor wrapping people around his finger. He is not the former, and even though he is a former actor, the quality waterline of acting in the Eastern Bloc is very low (and Russians are probably blind to this). In this light, I would propose that he simply misjudged - everybody probably told him that Trump tests your mettle but ultimately respects nobody more than a tough negotiator, and between 8 hours of jetlag and three years of ducking around in bunkers and not knowing when you will be hit by a Russian missile or shot in the back by your underlings, he just may have been understandably too out of it to read any warning signs that this was not working out after all and stop himself from digging in deeper.
*Western politicians are scary. Almost every real-life interaction I had with one felt like a Voice of Saruman moment.
I wouldn't count on that remaining the case forever. This form of self-identification is pretty far downstream from information diet, and we might still be in the phase where we are seeing the delayed effects of the 1950s-1990s period in which Mainland China was a relative memetic non-entity, and Taiwan looked to itself (and Japan, and the US) for narratives. In recent years, though, the PRC's output has grown so much that it is pushing to dominate certain segments (live-service games, in particular) even in non-Chinese-speaking locales. What would that be like if you are primarily a Chinese, rather than English, speaker? All my Chinese diaspora friends watch PRC films, listen to PRC music and play PRC games, even if they have no family ties to the mainland, and among them are many suckers for shared cultural patrimony wanks.
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