Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
Hm, just considered a possible offensive strategy for Africa - concentrate all their modern assets at the Pillars of Hercules and the Sinai, use their limited stock of modern weapons to cross into Spain (saving some to force a crossing of the Bosporus), zerg rush up Southern Spain and the Middle East (if the scenario allows), use Toyota warfare fueled by Algerian/Libyan petrol for logistics and mobility, modern civilian airliners for key supplies (can fly above the combat ceiling of early-war fighters, landing protected by MANPADs), otherwise rely for resupply on capturing European equipment and using local slave labour to run captured industries. You probably end up with grinding mountain warfare with both sides basically using WWII tech with some modern stuff sprinkled in, Africa having a much larger population but far lower-quality troops. Still almost certainly a win for Team Europe (I would guess Spain stabilizes at the Pyrenees, at which point the front is reliant on the Spanish munitions industry and a trickle of North African weapons production and ends up outgunned, and the Balkans is just infinite mountains full of racist guerillas), but a better show for Team Africa than sitting around being raided to death like a Japan with no navy.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
The sheer size of Africa also means it can be modeled as a relatively small set of logistical chokepoints that control the entire continent, and capturing or knocking out one generally means that area is taken out of the war, since the logistics are not joined up between different regions. Team Africa would need to spread their limited and irreplaceable modern weapons around the continent for coastal defense (e.g. South Africa currently has just two Gripens and 3/4 Hawks available, with the entire helicopter fleet grounded for lack of fuel), with a rapid reaction force of infantry flying around in commercial planes to respond to any landings.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
South Africa actually retains a fair amount of its HEU, enough for 2-3 1945-level nukes. I doubt their capacity to build it into a functioning bomb (particularly if the power blocs around are allowed to use espionage and sabotage), given that everyone involved in the 1970s program is either dead or very elderly. But they have no enrichment capacity and would have to rebuild that from scratch.
Other issues are like Africa only supplies 2/3 of their food supply I’ve seen so internal riots on food are an issue.
Not just that - Africa is also reliant on commodity exports that would get wrecked by U-boats and commerce raiders. So no food and no money (except the suitcases of gold coming off of U-boats, courtesy of SIS and Abwehr).
Someone on Twitter pointed out that the best first move for Europe would be to raid Cape Town and capture the Air Force museum there, get the jets on a ship and reverse-engineer them, which I found quite amusing. I'd also suggest beelining to what remains of the University of Cape Town library (it burnt down a couple years back, in large part because the University neglected to clean the roof gutters) and looting the science and engineering section.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Notice how there's a massive gulf (even in Hoffmeister's maximally generous list) between the looks of "stand-up comedians" and "screen actresses who specialize in comedy". One gets paid a lot more for a much more pleasant job.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
What a perfect typo.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
Just fyi, since you say you're not in the country and thus not irradiated as much by our media, the SAVE act is long dead. Enough Republicans in safe seat sinecures decided it wasn't worth upsetting the apple cart. Generally, you can safely assume that Congress intends to do nothing and there are no meaningful legislative agendas aside from "spend more money so we can raise more money".
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
I had to look up MS NOW to see that they are in fact The Network Formerly Known As MSNBC. I guess if you're pivoting to the full-on grift grind it makes sense to change your name to something more like a Wordpress website with banner ads for dick pills.
Bartender_Venator
25d ago
They do it to themselves, actually - being given a drink mixed with mineral oil is a common hazing thing. If your pledge father's cool he'll tell you, so you can go puke it up before it hits your intestine.
Bartender_Venator
25d ago
The most parsimonious explanation for Talarico to me seems similar to Biden's campaigns (before it all blew up): you're a Democratic campaign manager, and your candidate turns out to be kind of bad at campaigning. You know the media will essentially do your campaigning for you, and this guy is hurting your internals compared to Generic Democrat every time the public sees his face. So what do you do? Shove the guy in a basement, use the time to coach him like mad, and try to get to Election Day with voters thinking about negatives on Republicans rather than about your guy in particular. Which makes sense given how Talarico was selected ("fuck, we can't run Crockett, what white guys do we have left?"), but I suppose we'll see over the next couple weeks whether the campaign keeps him on ice or tries to get him back out there.
Bartender_Venator
28d ago
It's kind of a principle of the thing situation, that one is a particularly military (in the West) form of execution, and one is for common criminals.
Bartender_Venator
28d ago
The dignity is the issue - a firing squad is an honourable method of execution for soldiers, hanging marks someone as dying a criminal's death rather than a soldier's (this was a contested issue at Nuremberg, for instance). This is not particularly consistent across American military history, as far as I can tell, but hanging is definitely more of a "traitor's death". I do suspect there's some concern involved about the optics of a botched hanging, given how little it's done nowadays, even China goes for firing squad/injection.
Bartender_Venator
29d ago
They're the same picture. Look at the rules for Aella's gangbang, or any polycule, or a rat-adjacent house party (my favourite was one party series that was weirdly adamant that no alcohol could be left in the host's house after the party ended - in a 'telling on yourself' way, not in a 'you guys go have fun' way). The main difference is that dumb people need strict external rules to not destroy themselves, and smart autists need strict internally-imposed rules in order to feel safe enough to let loose. Smart non-autists can just party like a normal person and wing it.
Bartender_Venator
29d ago
I know plenty of geniuses who like to do drugs and sleep around, but the bay area crowd isn't even good at it. It's more accurate to say they want to be hedonists, but they're autistically afraid of experiencing any of the inherent dangers of hedonism, so they construct safe little simulacrascapes of it. Wouldn't last thirty seconds in Dimes Square, let alone the places where shit really goes down.
Bartender_Venator
30d ago
The downside is that it would probably take a planet-sized superintelligence to make GOFAI work.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The more common term for a serious, intelligent Libertarian for the last decade-plus has been "neoreactionary". Mr. Caplan is certainly intelligent.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
There is no 'liberal' or 'classical liberal' position in history that includes open borders. As he justifies it, it's more of an extreme libertarian belief, and hardline libertarians have always been politically homeless from the moment they diverged from right-liberalism (which included freedom of the individual, but also the common good of the nation and the maintenance of tradition through non-governmental means). I believe Caplan would also describe himself as a libertarian.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
If I was in charge of a frat with dudes that did this, they'd be reprimanded or kicked out*
It's actually kind of a tough line to walk (I'll assume here, given that you were once a teenage girl, that you weren't in a frat). From a fratboy perspective, there are two liability issues: first, the reputational and potential legal damage of having the orgy in the first place. We'll bracket the legal, since what that should be is the dispute at hand - reputationally, if the orgy is socially understood as fully consensual, it's mixed but generally a net good for the frat's reputation, you'll make the other guys jealous and probably pique some girls' interest. Tough for the girl in question but that's how greek life gender dynamics work, if you're disgusted by weird sex stuff you're not going to make it past the hazing. Second, the damage of the messages sent in the group chat. If I was president, even if the girl in question loved the experience and came back for more (which happens, there are girls who pride themselves on going through as much of a given frat as they can), I'd be tanning the hide of whichever idiot sent stuff like "free pussy in room X". You're taking a totally negligent approach to party safety, an attitude to women (including sorority girls) which they will find repellent, gift-wrapping it for the salty geeds at the campus newspaper, and you're broadcasting it permanently to 57 people?! You're essentially handing a massive potential blackmail to anybody in that group. What if the frat needs to kick out a problem brother next semester and he shows you a screenshot of the messages? (Again, not hypothetical, something like this happened to a frat I knew - a brother did something extremely unpleasant to another, was kicked out, and aired out every offensive message in groupchats he had). What if some brother's an idiot and shows them to his friends to brag? What if one's dumb enough to show them to a girl to play pick-me? The only way you could get away with harshly punishing the guy who sent the messages is because they'd be equally embarrassing for him if revealed. Kids these days and their stupid phones...
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Also funny is that in an alternate universe where Craig was allowed to attend the Halloween party, prance around in a slutty costume for a few hours before snorting some ketamine off cock and fucking and sucking some number of Chi Phi bros
I read this without remembering that Craig was her surname, and thought, well, that probably would have caused a different kind of drama.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Imagining a feminist account of Saddam Hussein's capture which is concerned entirely with the yonic nature of the hole he was hiding in.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The fraternity president - who did not have sex with her - disinvited her. He is likely also the male who "shut down whatever the fuck this is", and was probably acting under pressure from the sorority queen bee regarding the disinvitation.
Even if it's not entirely legally true, it's generally considered in frats that the president is the face of the frat both in dealing with the university and the legal system, and shoulders a lot of personal liability in his role. The job of the president is to be the most paranoid and stressed-out guy in the house, not an easy job. I've known many cases where everyone's chill with something and the president has to step in and shut it down (and, very occasionally, like this, it backfires horribly).
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Honestly, I'd guess Valerie Solanas being a Baathist wouldn't even be top 5 in the strangest links between American progressive activists and third world postcolonial regimes.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Funny, from the examples given on Wikipedia, it sounds like a mash-up of regional British accents, almost half Scots half West Country.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
It's also very good at planning out a walking/transit/driving itinerary between sites (just remind it to leave time for chilling, coffees, and the general interruptions of travel)
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
This is pretty basic tribal behaviour. When a group has social power, one of the things they use that for is enforcing their taboos on outsiders by dogpiling them (part of a scale of escalation, roughly: dogpiling, career damage, state enforcement, execution/murder - different groups have different levels of power to enforce, nobody in this dispute is getting their head sawed off like they might over a joke about Muhammad). This is basically universal, or at least counterexamples are very rare. Such is life, individual members who are more reasonable and easygoing don't have veto power over their group. What's unusual is that nobody's used to Christians on the internet (or, specifically, on X dot com the everything app) feeling they have that kind of social power.
I recall that back before AIAYN came out, most of the buzz in the air about a potential breakthrough was around LSTMs.
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