Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
31m ago
There is a bizarre meme going around the segment of the right that still listens to libertarians that in fact, the left are entirely correct about the chuds' motivations for voting, and the sole reason why the American right-wing voter supports capitalism is because they're too racist to spend money on black people. I assume libertarians took on the talking point because it's so detached from actual people that only a highly educated person could possibly believe it ("nonsense is a uniform", as they say), and therefore signals some kind of status in their world - plus that there are few higher aspirations for a libertarian than to find a galaxy-brained way to agree with the left. But it's obviously not true, and is based on a facile reading of studies about the relationship between diversity and the breakdown of social solidary that doesn't survive a moment's contact with empirical reality. No, white Americans did not choose economic liberty as a principle of government because doing so denied gibs to black people. Nobody seriously believes any of this, it's just a Hot Take.
Bartender_Venator
41m ago
City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity
Have you, uh, been downtown in a US city in the past ten years?
Bartender_Venator
46m ago
"Trump is a Russian asset" is a 'borderline conspiracy theory'
Ok man, take your hands off the keyboard. Take a deep breath, in and out, in and out. Now go into the bathroom, and look in the mirror. Repeat those words to yourself, out loud, looking in your own eyes. Try to keep a straight face - no giggling, no shamefaced grimace. Can you do it? If so, I'm impressed, that's some serious dedication to the bit.
Bartender_Venator
4hr ago
ok, that makes more sense then
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
I am a notable fan of Napoleon III on balance for his impressive domestic accomplishments, but his foreign policy pretty uniformly blew up in his face - even the unification of Italy just bogged him down in the Papal question.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
He's engaging in siege-warfare egotistical excesses? Or are you referring to Demetrius Poliorketes?
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
Technically, I think the non-consecutive terms make him both brothers.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
Although I'll note that Henry VIII's wars are one of the least remembered things about him, compared to his personal life, religious policy, or even diplomacy (Field of the Cloth of Gold). All that money culminated in... burning down Edinburgh, occupying Boulogne for six years, and selling that town back to the French. Almost as much of a waste of money as the Great Society.
Bartender_Venator
12hr ago
Before Covid I went to a couple meetups just to try and meet people in DC who weren't working in politics, and my experience was that the right move on meetups is to go to ones for hobbies that well-adjusted people do, but where they need a meetup to find fellow hobbyists. Recall the writers' meetups being particularly good.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
The big issues imo are that the US did not force Karzai to build a proper national patronage network, and that the projects that could have delivered quality-of-life improvements to the average Afghan were run through useless Western NGOs and development agencies. The country runs on "bribery", as all premodern states did, and doesn't understand democracy, so bribe them and stop worrying about voting.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
The Great Game and associated Great Power conflicts have generally worked well for Afghanistan until they actually get invaded, because being important meant foreign subsidies and arms for Kabul. Afghans simply do not give a shit about "not being a gamepiece" - they're living in a mountainous subsistence economy, and the strategy of successive Afghan regimes has been to try and make themselves important enough to the rest of the world to get foreign funding they can distribute to the regions as patronage. Note also that Pashtunwali only applies to about half of the country. Thomas Barfield very good on this
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
The Taliban are a strange outlier by historical Afghan standards. Generally, Afghanistan has been governed by a centralized Kabul regime which distributes foreign patronage to provincial strongmen in return for nominal fealty. In theory we could have done something similar with Karzai, but he and his cronies just stole all the money instead of delivering it to clients.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
The "attack on the French language" thing is particularly transparently dishonest from Carney. Trump's devastating alpha strike on Quebecois identity is... not requiring US streaming services to promote French-Canadian content.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
To be clear here - you're suggesting that a Taiwan conflict could end in a land invasion of Mainland China?
Kurds in Afghanistan?
You're probably thinking of the Kurds in Iraq, who are doing great by regional standards. The allies we left behind in Afghanistan were mostly Tajiks and to some extent Hazaras.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
If you want to suggest that he hired a Turkish contractor out of racial kinship bias, say it. Then put in the work to actually defend it, because this mealy-mouthed aside isn’t enough. I guess the source article does the same thing. But I digress.
I'm sure you know Texan business, but I know Turkish business, and I would want journalists (or the FBI) to take a serious look at the decision to use Repkon. Gezen being a US-born citizen, I'll suspend judgment, but in this sort of area in Turkey, corruption is the null hypothesis.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
iirc we're supposed to catapult toxic waste into it until they help us make shortform video more addicting
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I get it, but standard artillery is essentially only relevant to a land war in Europe. We're already ~fighting a land war in Europe, and as much as I'd love to liberate Sweden, that's the only one happening in the theatre for the foreseeable future. Latam/Middle East/Africa, the opposing forces will not be competent/coherent enough for you to need conventional artillery (with the exception of Iran, which is geographically un-invadable anyway), and any China conflict is a purely air/naval one, unless you're expecting trench warfare in Taipei. The shell shortage is damning not because shells are universally critical munitions, but because of what it says about the rest of our military supply chain.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
It seems incredibly bizarre to me that we should allow any Canadians, except for the good people of Alberta, to vote. I prefer "Canadian Territory".
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
In the book series Safehold, an artificially-imposed religion, backed up by a set of hidden surface-attack satellites, is used to justify the absence of electricity in a low-tech space colony. Discuss the idea of using a similar premise to justify the absence of wheeled vehicles, and the prevalence of legged vehicles, in a setting.
I misread "Safehold" as "Seinfeld", and ChatGPT's attempt to write a Seinfeld scene on the topic is quite something:
GEORGE: What did Saint Newman reveal?
Kramer leans in.
KRAMER: The circle is an abomination.
Silence.
JERRY: The circle.
KRAMER: The circle. No beginning, no end. Man wasn't meant to make something like that.
ELAINE: What about plates?
KRAMER: Ceremonial exemption.
JERRY: Coins?
KRAMER: Flattened spheres.
GEORGE: Bagels?
Kramer hesitates.
KRAMER: That's controversial.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
One I loled at:
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the migrants, and I did not speak out, for I was not a migrant.
Then all the problems were solved, so they kind of stopped coming for people.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
I've seen some people suggest that what makes a lot of Third World men abuse Western women who're seen as too loose is because of terminal pornbrain.
This goes back before internet porn. I was told in Turkey that it was a big problem back when mass tourism first started coming (harassment more than rape, because Turkish police are scary fuckers) that a lot the young men who became tour guides, hotel workers, etc. had been taught by clerics that Western women were all whores who would have sex at the drop of a hat, and of course the young men were really hoping that would be true.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
For most of these countries - think like West Africa, not Afghanistan - their wealthy elites all want to be able to visit the West, buy property, open bank accounts. And they're the ones who have the power at home.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
There are some things which are beyond politics and science - in particular, the domain of the tragic. If HBD, and genetic determinism more broadly, are true, they are part of the tragic nature of the human condition. Modernity tries to deny that nature, because it believes there can be nothing beyond politics and science (and modernity has ameliorated our condition - mass infant mortality is no longer one of our tragedies, for instance, and I recall Scott's old take on HBD being "let's not think too much about it but work really hard on gene editing to boost intelligence"). Historically, people have turned to faith and art, but we're not as good at that these days, either.
I used to hook up with a Latina tattoo artist who lived in the neighbourhood Hanania grew up in. Fifteen minutes of driving from the freeway to her house and back were enough to realize why it would give a fellow permanently crippling class anxiety.
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