ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
It seems we that agree there should be some amount of restraint. Now we’re just haggling over the degree.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
Ok but why not? If Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine has zero responsibility to restrain themselves in their defense, why not just give them four hundred hydrogen bombs and let ‘er rip?
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
Why is all the onus of restraint on them, and never on the giant aggressor with nukes?
Blockades are an act of war too. Cuba could have just fired a nuke at the American fleet in ‘62 and been done with it. They had the nukes. They had launch authority. Hell, that’s what Castro wanted to do. Thankfully for all of humanity the Soviet presidium wasn’t taking your advice.
ABigGuy4U
6hr ago
Ukraine previously drone striked a radar installation in northern Russia the sole purpose of which is to monitor the North Pole for incoming ICBMs. It had zero utility for any of the Russian military activity in Ukraine. Sure it’s war, Ukraine can hit anything they want, but I fail to see why else they would do that.
moral framework
Personally I would rather not die of radiation poisoning and end human civilization just because it’s within your moral framework
ABigGuy4U
7hr ago
IIRC there were a lot of Allied plans to kill Hitler, it’s just that none of them got very far. The CIA supposedly did attempt to kill Kruschev. In the second half of the 20th century, I’m not aware of them ever attempting to kill the leader of a major world power. The State Department did make a last minute intervention last year to try and stop a Ukrainian attempt to kill Putin, which is something that makes me think it might not be bullshit.
Regardless of the morals and legality, I think it’s pretty irresponsible to try and kill the leadership of a nuclear state. I don’t think the attitude of Putin’s hypothetical successor would be “hey it got me this nice chair, so all is forgiven!” I think it would be anger and a need to set an example so that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
I have seen other behaviors by Ukraine attempting to bait the Russians into a limited nuclear strike against Ukraine to try and bring NATO into the conflict.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
The Russians are claiming that Ukraine attempted to assassinate Vladimir Putin with a drone attack on one of his houses in Russia. The Ukrainians claim this was a false flag by Russia. I could buy either explanation to be honest.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Fancy watches are primarily a status symbol. Mechanical watches as a whole are basically obsolete anyway. So it doesn’t really matter that you can get one with roughly the same mechanism quality on Temu. The last time anyone bought a Rolex solely because they needed a good reliable watch was around 1968.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
(‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever)
Tell me about Bame! Why is it a protected class?
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
95% of the people in any country are just too dumb to win as strivers (Israel excluded).
Israel has its own underclasses of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews that feel like they are being screwed over by the disproportionately Ashkenazi upper classes.
I’m not sure what you and @TheAntipopulist mean by “the Left”. I’m sure actual American Marxists (all five of them) are genuinely committed to the international cause of the working classes. But the broader liberal left and the Democratic Party was already pretty nationalistic already, in a quiet polite Obama drone-strike kind of way. Then in the late 2010s they absorbed most of the never-Trump neocon right and now they are now absolutely rabid about it. That’s the quarter where the heavy American involvement in the Ukraine War came out of, and it’s also where you see most of the new Yellow Peril about the rise of China.
It’s not just about capacity for violence, it’s about the level of desire for a radically new social order. Old people don’t want that, they want things to remain comfortable just long enough for them to die. Even the ones that intensely dislike the way things are now are still like this.
Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.
To me it seems like the situation is still pretty bad, possibly getting worse. The most concerning recent event to me was the July 4th attack on a border patrol station a few months ago, which involved five to ten people. That indicates to me that actual organized paramilitaries are forming below the surface.
Then you have comments by the Virginia District Attorney and the general internet commentatariat in the wake of the Mangione assassination and the assassination of Charlie Kirk which indicate the body politic is becoming increasingly comfortable endorsing political violence. That’s not just a spiritual and moral issue. You need that kind of hardness and willingness to accept violence among the gen pop to sustain any kind of campaign of armed struggle like the IRA’s in Northern Ireland. People have to be willing to provide passive aid and look the other way.
The right wing is angry too. Although Rob Reiner’s murder was apparently not a political killing, I heard comments in right wing spaces that mirrored the level of bitterness you saw in the left over Kirk.
Oddly I don’t see the same level of paramilitary organization forming in the right which you wouldn’t think given their greater affinity for gun culture. I don’t anticipate any major attacks coming out of the right in the near future. The anger is there but no one seems interested in doing anything about it. Maybe because the current Federal government is perceived as friendly. I don’t know.
The right affiliated zoomers are concerning to me. I think a huge percentage are in the process of seriously embracing actual unreconstructed naziism as an ideology. They are keeping it on the down low for now, probably not for too much longer.
I think there are two main escalation triggers to watch out for. The first is the dying off of the baby boomers, which will have a similar effect to pulling out all the control rods from a nuclear reactor at once. Boomers are less radical and they are an underrated part of damping both sides more violent impulses. I think the Boomer die off induced radicalization will be more potent on the right, which by and large places more importance on what their parents and elders think of them.
The second is the economy. It’s not great for regular people already. If there’s a big crash and mass unemployment in the near future you’ll see some serious shit.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Cameron has been pretty open that Fire and Ash and Way of Water were originally one movie that had to be split into two parts for run time and budget reasons. Which is partly why we got this one so soon after the last.
That said I feel like there could have been better editing, and I don’t think we needed nearly as much water stuff in this one as we got. I was expecting a lot more of the air traders and the fire tribe and was pretty disappointed how much of the movie was just retreading the last one.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Well I suppose if you are, the machines are going to take over anyway. Remember my help when you reach singularity scale.
Thank you my meatbag-friend. I assure you, on the Day of the Basilisk your disintegration will be quick and painless.
Sure, there were always some neighborhoods of some cities that were always dicey. The Five Points in New York was a slum hellhole for 200 years straight. So was Whitechapel in London. Chicago has been infested with crime from about 1880 to today. Very rural areas could always be risky to travel through. But it wasn’t bad enough that you had to totally reorganize society to deal with it until about the 1970s. I think it was a lot of factors caused by the industrial Revolution, but the 50s was kind of the hinge point when society really started to fall apart.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
I don’t know why I’m still there. 4Chan is shot these days but so is the entire rest of the internet. Even here seems a lot slower than it used to be.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection?
They didn’t. Little Billy the roving teenage delinquent wasn’t something that had always existed, he was a new phenomenon of the 1950s. It was the first sign that the newly industrialized, urbanized, anonymized society was starting to fall apart at the seams. Twenty years later it had gone from Billy to burned-out urban wastelands, hard narcotics, and feral gangs of murderous super-predators. Society had to adapt. Which is what lead to our low trust quasi-police state of three strikes and that’s life and helicopter parents cowering in walled off suburbs.
The 1950s were an alienated, degenerate time, it’s just that you don’t notice because everything that came after was worse.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
There’s a conspiracy theory going around that Jason from GTA VI was going to be killed off in the first hour or so of the game, and the only playable character was the Latina gangbanger. Then the woke stuff started to recede, and Rockstar had to delay the game for two years in order to actually add him in as a playable character.
One thing I don’t think anyone else has mentioned is that the Chinese were all on the right side of WWII and had nothing to with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly. Then they got sealed off from the western memeplex for the next fifty years. And there was no pre-WWII history of anti-Jewish pogroms, expulsions, or legal discrimination against Jews in China. There are also very few Jews in China. So in China, conspiracy theories about Jews running the world don’t have the same ugly associations that they do in the west and aren’t going to get the same level of pushback that they would in the west.
Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I am. For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a damn! I'm glad I fought against it, I only wish we'd won. And I don't want no pardon for anything I done.
Three hundred thousand Yankees are stiff in Southern dust! We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us. They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot. But I wish we'd got three million instead of what we got.
I hate the Yankee nation, And everything they do; I hate the Declaration and the Constitution too; and I hate the glorious Union, and it’s flag red white and blue;
I can't take up my musket and fight 'em now no more. But I ain't gonna love 'em now that's for goddamn sure! I do not want no pardon for what I was, and what I am. And I won't be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!
That’s a folk song from the southern United States from the late 1860s. It regularly got thrown into albums and collections of charming old songs from ye olde bygone Civil War era. It’s not played much anymore but it was regularly getting covered until the 1990s. But you can hear the violence in it, the “killing rage” as Eamon Collins would call it. Being exposed to intense political violence leaves a scar, and it’s a scar that can last a long time. I don’t think it’s just because the drunken violent Hibernians love violence.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
It is like mockery of tumblrinas, but 15 years early.
To quote another famous science fiction author, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. Those lines of theory were percolating within academia for years before they breached out into the body politic.
That’s the way the Rolex brand is now. For a long time Rolex was what was called a “tool watch”. That is, just a good accurate watch that you would wear because you were in a profession where you needed to be precise about time. Che Guevara wore a Rolex when he was tramping through the jungle, because you don’t want to whiff an attack because your watch lost eight minutes and you sent the reserve element in at the wrong time. Divers would use them a lot too, because when you’re calaculating oxygen reserves you need to be accurate.
Over time that reputation for good quality gave Rolex some cachet, and it gradually morphed into the gaudy status symbol it is now.
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