JTarrou
3d ago
Ok mate, if you don't want to make the connection, I'm not going to do it for you.
JTarrou
4d ago
Op says "healthy memetics", and you read that as "stagnant memetics"?
What are you actually saying here?
JTarrou
5d ago
Or it could sound like China.
It's interesting that you equate a stable population with stagnation and lack of social mobility. Care to say more about why you think that is?
JTarrou
6d ago
Obviously it's incompetence, the question is whether the brass at the FBI intentionally put their dumbest guy on the case so they could continue to tie it to Trump for five years. Or is this just how they roll?
Just as obviously the Secret Service's performance protecting the president is dogshit, the only question is whether they intentionally put the dumbest hundred and fifty staff all on his team, or if their performance is representative of the SS.
Either answer is pretty bad.
JTarrou
7d ago
Europe is and always will be our friend
Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.
They gave it all up for cradle-to-grave welfare, 20k average incomes, tens of millions of muslim migrants and a military capacity roughly equivalent to my family reunions. The nation that once gave the world the Rollo and Harald Hardrada now gives the world Greta Thunberg. A seafaring adventurer of a different sort, it must be said.
JTarrou
8d ago
Can people on the right not be centrist? You just described the center-right. The hard right may or may not be pro Trump, and is DEFINITELY not pro-Israel, and may or may not be pro-Ukraine.
"Has right-wing guests on" - We're still doing this? Having people to the right of you on a show to talk means you can't be a centrist? The nested assumptions here are wonderful. Let's get some data:
1: What percentage of the right half of the political spectrum do you think is centrist, moderate and extreme?
2: What percentage of the left half of the political spectrum do you think is centrist, moderate and extreme?
3: Do these numbers match?
JTarrou
9d ago
The Wild West is not back, the internet is mostly caged. This is just the anarcho-tyranny of the ruling class.
Remember, to these people Tim Pool is not a "centrist" but the hard right edge of literal Nazis murdering black and brown bodies on the daily. The hyperventilation some years back about "stochastic terrorism" was projection.
JTarrou
13d ago
Exactly how many countries has Trump invaded and stolen their oil?
Once again, you're arguing from your imagination of someone else's psychology.
Trump has said a lot of wild shit. You got any reason for thinking that statement was any more revealing of his inner soul than any other?
If you look at what he's actually done in military actions over the five years of his presidency or so, he draws down forces if he can, doesn't commit to anything new, and if something happens he bombs something. Houthis? Iran's nuclear reactors? Drug boats?
Anti-war doesn't mean anti-military-action. Up until now, Trump has been quite careful and diplomatic with military action, waffling and A-B testing until everyone's arguing. Sometimes he uses the pressure to do a deal (North Korea) and it never comes to strikes. Sometimes the deal is done after strikes (Iran). In my estimation, the drug boat thing is no different, he's pressuring Maduro and by extension the various South and Central American rulers to get control of the flows of people and drugs to the US.
If he puts line ground troops into Venezuela, I'm wrong. If he bombs a few things, ratchets up tensions, threatens regime change and then does a deal where he's shaking Maduro's hand on TV, I'm right.
Edit: The imaginary deal I'm teasing will probably not change much materially, but that isn't the point.
JTarrou
14d ago
I think it was, at least compared to western europe or east asia. I lived in Russia in the early '90s, and it was extremely low trust as a society. Everything is accomplished through bribery, nepotism and blackmail, nothing through official venues. The people don't trust the government or each other, the government doesn't trust the people or itself.
There are various Russian theories about this, but the most popular I recall was that Russian society evolved under extremely harsh foreign domination, the Mongols, Golden Horde, Polish-Lithuanians etc. and their own homegrown psychopaths. Russian elite society is incredibly low-trust and untrustworthy, moreso than the rest, hence the regular purges that have marked all of Russian political history.
Recall the tale of the murder of Rasputin, and if it sounds crazy, realize that the Russian nobility did shit like that constantly.
JTarrou
14d ago
1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.
2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?
My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.
JTarrou
14d ago
Yet many do, and many more will do so temporarily on vacation or work trips. Given the difficulties and the pull of familiarity, family, culture etc., this is to my mind some evidence for the power of relative status.
JTarrou
16d ago
There is a point to be made about technology and the comforts, others have pointed out the obvious ability to hire people for that much money back then.
Another slight problem is the status differential. A hundred K back in 1959 puts you in a different social status for the day than that amount would today. Yes, you could buy more and better shit with it, but what people often want to buy with their cash is status. Whether luxury cars, penthouse apartments, living in a trendy neighborhood of a major city, etc. A hundred K today you could keep your head above water on a suburban mortgage outside a third-tier city and be respectably middle class. A hundred K in 1959 is enough to live like a country squire or the upper middle class of a major city. Send your kid to Harvard and shit.
I'm guessing there might be more than a few people who would choose 1959.
JTarrou
18d ago
Not with US public opinion we couldn't.
"Administering justice and securing a power base" are, to the media and the US public, genocide and war crimes. We have to send our diplomats to hawk sex change surgeries to hillside goatherders and offer to "learn from Women of Color" who have an explosive belt locked around their waist by the warlord their family sold them to.
JTarrou
18d ago
Yeah, maybe we could run the experiment in other people's countries first.
JTarrou
20d ago
YMMV, but "embedded with" =/= "beloved by"
Terps are like officers. Maybe someone somewhere had a good one, but for all the rest of us, they're the people most likely to get us killed.
Don't get me started on why revolutions are always worse than the regime they replace. The most modern of Reformation schismatic sects is busy recreating the monastery system in academia, where holy men undergo sexual reassignment to become a privileged caste of eunuchs.
JTarrou
20d ago
The strength of christianity historically has been its willingness to empower women due to the ease of extracting the fruits of that empowerment from them. Women being able to inherit property was an early core tenet of the catholic church, which they forced on most of Europe, because then they could then transfer that property to the priests. How do you think the church became a major landowner? Bequests from widows, divorcees and other women were a key source of income for the early church.
Of course, there isn't shit in the Bible that mandates any of this, but surviving religions come to have a theology that funds their continued existence. Christianity is a "topping from the bottom" religion, and as such has always had its core support among women. This is also why more masculinist philosophers have always hated it, from Aurelian to Nietzsche.
Our modern childish individualism sees people as complete and perfect, needing no training or education at all. We are taught to resist and subvert legitimate authority, and submit to the opinions of strangers on the internet.
How much of our educational idiocy is downstream of the inability of teachers to command the respect and attention of their students?
How much of our criminal idiocy is downstream of the resistance of large sections of the public to basic enforcement of the laws?
How much of our political idiocy is downstream of the unwillingness of our ruling class to support the government they control?
Ultimately, we all spend our lives on what we find important. We follow the rules we must to get where we want to go. We all serve, we are all limited. Freedom is not the lack of restriction, it is the choice of restriction.
JTarrou
23d ago
Yes, women are perfectly capable of doing basic office jobs so long as no hardship is involved. Not sure that qualifies as "military", but we let the officers wear uniforms, so waddaya waddaya.
Samuel Huntington wrote in the mid-90's about Ukraine, Russia and the Crimea during the period where the recent status quo was negotiated. He was saying back then that the natural opposition of civilizational forces was going to result in the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, or else the amputation of the Crimea and the related areas which were heavily Russian ethnically. This is just another one of those colonial states that didn't get partitioned correctly when the empire pulled out.
This was always in the cards, as is the natural tendency for locally dominant military powers to seek to control/influence the countries that border them. The US has an interest in who is in charge of Canada and Mexico. If the government is objectionable (or impotent) enough, we send troops in.
None of this justifies Russia abrogating its treaty and invading their former colony. It reinforces the bad lessons we're teaching about nonproliferation. If Ukraine hadn't given up their nukes for a pinkie promise from the Russians and the US, they might have had more options. But we deal with the world as it is.
The best case scenario for Europe is that Ukraine and Russia hammer out an ugly peace, Trump takes the blame, Russia takes the eastern third of Ukraine, NATO pushes to the borders of Russia itself, completing the European wall and saddling Putin with a festering international relations problem about the annexed provinces. This is also IMO the most likely scenario.
This is a bad outcome for Ukraine and the US, but far from the worst. Ukraine will have to become a de-facto dictatorship and military speed bump for Russia's next try. Or it could just collapse internally and become a semi-failed state.
The real winner in the whole idiotic project is China, who isn't involved and is able to test all their new gadgets while getting Russian oil at pennies on the dollar and turning the Russian economy into a Chinese fief. The days when a rapproachment between the US and Russia could counterweight China in Asia are over, China has secured their only big land border with an indebted and politically isolated Russia.
Russia, to my mind, has won the most pyrrhic of victories. Yes, in a decade they've been able to detach a few provinces from a weak and hilariously corrupt Ukraine, provinces that were 75% Russian to start with. And in return, they're going to get Nato up on their borders, their natural resources are in hock to the Chinese, the Europeans are scared shitless and looking for someone to surrender to, and it's probably going to be Trump.
The US position is getting better in Europe and worse in asia/Africa. It is unlikely we can stop China from expanding their asian hegemony. But with this Ukraine gambit, a lighter version of the Iron Curtain will be re-established, this time not in central Germany, but right up to the Russian and Belorussian borders.
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