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このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
If that's the case, it might still be possible to ASAT them individually because there are so few?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
It's hard to imagine any great-power war against the US not involving kesslering every useful orbit as the first move, which would likely destroy any long-range precision weaponry advantage that the US has (consider how even the medium-range kit Ukraine got is creaking under mere GPS jamming, and every Starlink outage causes pandemonium). Under lower-tech conditions, contesting China's geographical advantage over Taiwan may be hard for the US, whose military seems quite addicted to its C&C capabilities, and even the lessons of Ukraine's defense may not be applicable in a scenario where real fog of war is once again a factor.
The US would do well to fix in doctrine that destroying enough of its space assets will be grounds for unbounded nuclear retaliation, but it might require some preparatory propaganda to get people to accept it as reasonable so soft power doesn't suffer for it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
Why do you think GDP is the relevant measure of catching up with America?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards.
What does left and right even mean here, and in what way does it influence US policy towards China invading Taiwan? In Germany, the Green party is the local wing of the US progressive establishment, and they have been considered the most militaristic party (within a US-approved framework) since Afghanistan, which earned them the derogatory moniker "olive-greens" (as in the colour of camo). There is some understanding that culturally military~right, but interventionism and globalism are now more closely associated with the left.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
Granting that this is what happened, it sounds a lot like a case of what people here like calling "leopards eating faces" when it happens to the other side. Republicans are the law-and-order party that spent decades architecting a legal system where prosecutors have free rein to use tactics like blackmailing (or, equivalently, bribing) people to incriminate their allies, so as to be able to secure convictions in cases like gangs where they feel they caught a bad guy but can't find a legally watertight way to prove his guilt directly; now that they found themselves at the business end of this machinery, they are crying foul.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
It depends on the scale. For a claim of large-magnitude manipulation (skewing the popular vote by 5% or more), I'd take a plausible scenario how it could be done, corroborated by a significant number of eyewitness accounts from people who do not directly stand to benefit from the claim being proven true (in particular, disqualifying dedicated members of the party alleging manipulation to its disadvantage). Of course, this does leave the possibility that your party should have 55% of the vote but the other 45% have formed a unified block that will falsify the result while agreeing to keep it secret, but this in itself (almost complete absence of people who are not in the affected party, involved with the electoral process and would testify to manipulation they observed) seems like a very surprising scenario. Sure you could in turn concoct a conspiratorial scenario in which principled paper pushers do not exist and they all merely pretend in public that they would execute their role according to its description, and so on, but then increasingly your gap scenario will just look like an alternative model of reality on the algorithmic complexity level of a religion.
For a claim of smaller-scale manipulation (like a 0.5% skew that flips the result), evidence gets harder to come by (and to begin with, how would you even prove that any 0.5% manipulation against you that you presented evidence for was not outweighed by 1% manipulation for you that you didn't present evidence for?), but I'm also finding it harder to consider such cases a "stolen election". Elections shouldn't be sports contests, even if some people feel about them that way; for a country to be governed by the whims of 49.5% instead of the whims of 50.5% does not feel like a terrific delta-injustice. To begin with, this puts us in the range where an election could be "stolen" by adverse weather in a few large metro areas. Either way, this is not the order of magnitude that I expect the parent poster to be wrong by - apparently in 2016 both candidates received around 60 million votes, so he probably will wind up having to assert manipulation on the order of 20+%, based on nothing but the feeling that everyone he knows is extremely outraged about the conviction and so an approximate fifty-fifty can't possibly be representative.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the "door app" collects behavioural data that the operator can sell as a side gig, enabling them to undercut the previous NFC-based system when offering the system to your office. (They might also figure this makes it easier to issue and revoke access than if they had to issue/collect physical tokens.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
Do you think that Trump would still be likely to win after being convicted, jailed and released after being pardoned? It seems to me that if played right, such a move would be immensely emasculating - "you're only standing here because they took pity on you" - while also taking selectively taking some amount of wind out of the persecution narrative (which motivates the hardcore pro-Trump base) but not weakening the "he's a felon" narrative (which probably pushes at least some nose-holding establishment Republicans over the edge).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes
Put your reputational money where your mouth is. Is this a prediction? Would you be willing to concede that you were wrong if this doesn't come to pass, or would you just say that the election result must have been falsified?
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このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
So does she have any examples of this lack of nuance, charity and civility from people that represent positions she agrees with, or is it a phenomenon curiously concentrated in her opposition? On that matter, is she exhibiting nuance and charity herself in opining on why people she disagrees with advocate for their positions?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
Well, what is the upper bound of ideological difference that you are willing to tolerate from a trading partner? Russia is one matter in which the US is still lucky to have a great number of affluent nations sharing its majority perspective; China is frankly a wash; and on the topic of Israel, you might find yourself actually having the opposite perception on who is genociding whom from all but a small handful. It's all well if you say you will reject the sinful outside world and stay in your righteous bubble, but nations trade with each other because it's advantageous for them - moral righteousness does not on its own beget food, science or missiles, and at least the hypothetical extreme case of an isolated America-Israel alliance shunning everyone else as genocide abetters vs. the rest of the world trading freely with each other even as there are occasional local scuffles would probably not develop in the favour of the US in the long term even considering its geographical and human capital advantages.
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このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
I mean, if the steelman position for AA is that black unequal outcomes could at least to some extent be due to lack of ingroup role models (the "studying = acting white" thing) and therefore black role models should be created even if they are promoted above their station - making this generation fake it so the next can make it, so to speak - then it doesn't really matter if the Nigerians that Harvard fills its quotas with are disadvantaged, or have or want anything to do with African-Americans at all, as long as African-Americans unilaterally believe that the Nigerians are just like them and therefore are valid role models to follow. The last part at least seems plausible - X-Americans imagining that they are actually X even as real X laugh at them is a recurrent trope even for instances of X like Asian or Norwegian.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
I don't know, I read some of Zeihan's books ("Disunited Nations" and "The Accidental Superpower") before this conflict and found them to consist more of riveting just-so tales than compelling reasoning. The idea that Russia will attack Poland next seems like another just-so story, which just happens to be very convenient for the current American agenda ("Why should you pour money and participate in sanctions to defend this unrelated country? Because if you let Russia win, they will come for you next!"). Do you, or does Zeihan, have a persuasive argument as to why Russia would do that?
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
I don't know, what you said seems more like an aspirational comparison (you hope that it will have the same effect on Russia as Afghanistan had on the USSR) than one that identifies particularly many parallels between present-day details. There are many ways in which this conflict resembles colonial Vietnam and doesn't resemble Afghanistan, though I understand that someone who sympathises with the Ukrainian position might find this comparison pejorative simply on the basis of the Vietnam war's known outcome. For what it's worth, I'm not meaning to imply that an American intervention in Ukraine would end like the American intervention in Vietnam - the differences that become relevant there are too many, including lack of appetite for genuine guerrilla warfare and the presence of the "everybody who really cares about not surrendering to UA just escapes to mainland Russia" option that had no counterpart in the cornered beast that was north Vietnam.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
I've only started watching him about a month ago, what was the story there? My sense is, as I said, that right now his representation of the situation on the ground is better than most other sources, but it's possible that he does much worse when Russia is on the retreat.
But could the current level of Western support actually be maintained if it falls out of the news? It seems that the Western leadership may be stuck riding the tiger of public opinion here - they have to keep people sufficiently engaged and enraged that redirecting those resources elsewhere does not become a winning proposition, but not so much so that escalation and making a more serious effort to hand Russia a resounding defeat does. Even in the cynical environment of this forum, carefully maintaining the meat grinder at sous-vide temperature seems to be a position that it pains people to endorse - and there is always the question of Ukrainian morale, which may not in fact be in infinite supply.
This conflict really rhymes quite well with Vietnam (before the US came in), where at some point the motley coalition of inept French, decadent Southern leadership, genuine anti-Communist locals and peasants that were tentatively accepting the proposition that they will have a better life under the West started fraying as 2 and 4 were only willing to give so much for 1 and 3 and the US faced the choice between full commitment and humiliation.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
"Ahh but you see, your social movement is doomed for I have already drawn myself as the chad and you as the soy!"
I don't see where I come into it - whatever is my culture must be maximally far removed from the "men must push" one, because I was passively approached by the SO in every single relationship I have been in. However, yes, if your proposed social technology is shaming your target group but your culture is currently wired in a way that your natural allies are considered shameful relative to your target group, you should explain how you intend to flip the gradient. Almost any social problem can be solved if you could magic the exactly right type of social pressure into existence, and yet social problems persist.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
Being afraid of random death from something as unglorious as a bad flu doesn't necessarily entail being afraid of dying under any circumstances including a civilisational nuclear showdown.
or no one should have sex with them
So how exactly are you going to enforce this rule? If there's a fixed contingent of women that wants to be "conquered" in this fashion, the more men you persuade to follow your compact, the more advantageous will it be for the marginal man to defect, as there will be droves of women waiting for someone who is, in their eyes, still enough of a man to pursue them. Even if you posit that this preference that some/many women have is purely acquired and can be untaught, there will at least be a transitional period where you need to exercise tremendous amounts of coercion - which will, from the outside, look a lot like the "I consent - I consent - I don't" image macro, with the "don't" being an unpopular and unsuccessful man while the first two are popular and well-adjusted men and women - to stop male defectors.
The most likely outcome is that any attempt at enforcement will look exactly like our present reality, where you only get to pick off defectors at the most awkward and unsuccessful fringe, who at the end of their efforts can not present a woman witness that says that she actually liked it, both of them understood consent was actually implicitly given and outsiders should stop creepily insinuating themselves. This will only increase the signalling value of ignoring a "no" and getting away with it.
Recently, I found that for raw facts, the Youtuber going by "Military Summary Channel" is quite good. The flaws with it are that he has a very obvious pro-Russian bias that he tries to mask but that usually manifests itself in the form of calling absolutely every Russian advance very important and every problem experienced by Ukraine catastrophic, and picking video captions that exaggerate Russian gains that disagree with what he actually winds up saying in the video. This, along with the extremely formulaic script that may be due to bad command of English but still wanting to sound "professional", makes him useless as a source of opinion and prognosis. However, I found him unusually well-calibrated when it comes to integrating the various sources to determine who actually controls what piece of land at a given time and colouring the map, with many instances of him being correctly skeptical against both all the pro-Russian mappers and the doomer contingent of pro-Ukrainian ones, while not just being unidirectionally slow to accept changes in control that are eventually confirmed.
The next best pro-Russian "daily updates and maps" sort of source is still the Telegram user @rybar (you'll need to autotranslate for most of it), whose emotional calibration on importance of developments and future prospects actually seems more on point than the above - however, the crackdown on independent milbloggers a few months into a war coupled with his high profile really did a number on him, making him cease giving candid long-form assessments so you need to read between the lines a bit to get his actual opinion. He does jump the gun on map colouring sometimes. Also, being very pro-Russian and having been partnered into the semi-official propaganda apparatus, the ethically rather than militarily relevant parts of the assessment (which civilian deaths are evil vs. which ones are justified etc.) will still have a directionality that a pro-Western reader is likely to find grating.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
Obviously not the parent poster, but one glaring thing about the whole essay is that she doesn't seem to waste a single word of reflection on what she, or the other women she talks about, could have done to avoid the bad outcomes they experienced. A good start would be to spend some thought on questions like: why was I attracted to the guy that turned out to be a jerk? What did he say that made me believe he would be or do something he actually wouldn't? Could I have recognised the deception beforehand? Were some experiences better than others? What set those apart? Is there a way I could optimise in that direction in the future? Instead, she is lamenting it in the fashion of people who complain that everything on TV is boring, or social media addicts who lament that their social media is toxic and make periodic shows of quitting it, only to inevitably come back and resume being prime contributors to it being toxic for everyone else.
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このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
It seems to me that every single one of your arguments again places a convenient cutoff point on history. The 1948 war was preceded by massive Jewish immigration into Palestinian lands, terrorism by armed groups representing it, and them leveraging their ties to the international community to secure support for plans that already amounted to mass expropriations of Palestinians; the post-WWII Germans had just finished doing WWII (and as far as I can tell the expatriate ethnically German populations were friendly with the Nazis wherever they encountered them on their drive east); presumably "fedposting" implies things that are not proportional to vaccine mandates and lockdowns (but I have to say that if anti-lockdowners created a compound where they kept loudly pro-lockdown individuals under house arrest, I would not feel like an injustice is being committed).
The particular reason why Palestinians are more entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics than these groups is that they have been subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
Sorry, I didn't quite grasp the structure of the argument there. I don't know enough about the IRA to answer this with confidence, but my vague understanding is that a lot of the IRA bombings certainly looked like they were maximising English civilian deaths.
maximizes civilian casualties on their own side tactically
This is such an extreme claim about Hamas that I would want to see evidence from it, ideally not just consisting of opinions from pro-Israel sources - unless you stretch the definition so far that it applies to any case of "use civilian infrastructure for cover so you are harder to eradicate with anything short of omnicidal measures [which you figure your enemies won't take]", in which case this seems to cover Ukraine as well (a bridge that I imagine people who are going to argue for "American foreign policy is basically good" are not willing to cross).
(P.S. Your account of the genetic and cultural history of the Jews and Palestinians is very off. I can send you some of Razib Khan's substack posts if you actually care, but I don't think you do.)
By all means please do. I don't understand why you think I wouldn't care, unless you pegged me as running my argument due to some ideological stance that is very different from my actual one. The studies cited in this Wikipedia article seem to be broadly in line of what I believed, though.
So, if the Israelis just continue on this path another couple centuries they will own their land just as much as the Scots, English, or Palestinians do now.
That is not particularly at odds with my moral intuitions, though it is not quite equivalent to what I said - I think that direct descent from conquered and conquerors gives you moral license to reclaim much further into the future, and in the Palestinian case that descent is broken because the Jews only have this license against the Romans, who have long been expelled. The future is not now, though; the Israeli invasion is still very fresh.
Carrier strike groups, or the planes launched from them, still need to get close to be useful - close enough that you could find them with clouds of cheap drones flying WWII-style search patterns (China has overwhelming manufacturing advantage there) or radar. I don't see why China would need to strike them while they are circling out in the open Pacific, if they can't do anything significant to interfere from out there because they have no significant quantity of weaponry in the intersection of "gets past layered air defence" (something that China will have in its own vicinity and the US won't) and "finds its target". Taiwan, too, has layered air defense and proximity, but without the US being able to bring much to the table anymore it would just get overwhelmed.
The point, I think, is more in that the US must know and fear this possibility; a loss of its space-based recon and targeting would spell trouble not just in Taiwan but in every other theatre (would Ukraine or Israel be able to hold on without their current ability to be forewarned of any troop concentration and surface construction ability almost immediately?). My lay sense would be that yielding Taiwan and trying to make the best of the outcome would be better for global US power prospects than yielding the space advantage and fighting for Taiwan, even if the latter fought can somehow be won (as in Taiwan stays independent and US-aligned).
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