Jesweez
1d ago
I’m extremely averse to all of this and I’ll tell you why.
It’s been a common trope that once the generation who knows war firsthand dies out then the naive people left behind will get the itch and repeat the horrors again for a new generation.
And right on schedule, the WW2 generation has finally died out and we’ve now got all three major military powers talking about annexation of territories for the glory of it.
You’ll probably say, but we’d only do things peacefully! No way current MAGA would ever launch a war of conquest!
And that’s comforting for me to believe and it might even be true, but the problem is that you’ve all done away with the Overton window so thoroughly that I have no functioning means of predicting just how far outside of it things might go.
A few months ago it would have been crazy to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking foreign territory. He’s the isolationist America first guy! A few days ago it would have been ridiculous to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking over Gaza. Sure Greenland sounds cool but Gaza, but come on, that one is wild.
I’m getting tired, boss, and it’s because I no longer have any functioning mental model of just how far people who want to expand the Overton window want to go. And the direction that it seems to be getting pulled in is one that triggers my “these guys might be the type to fuck around and repeat the horrors” sense. Sure no one sets out to do that, but it’s easy to imagine us getting drawn slowly along a road bad road. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon the window might get yanked back over there again.
It seems that no matter how crazy I think something might be, once it happens there’s masses of people who will come to argue for it and why it’s suddenly based, even if they wouldn’t have done so a week ago had I suggested the same idea.
Basically I don’t trust y’all with the window. I’ve graduated from my idealistic youth stage to now become conservative to slow down further changes to the Overton window until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
Jesweez
2d ago
His recent obsession with acquiring foreign territory is really strange. It’s been two weeks, and already there’s 4 or so territories that he’s consistently talking about trying to take.
I don’t know but I’m starting to set my assumption toward there being something even more wrong with his brain than I previously thought rather than him doing this in a posturing way or to get some kind of outcome.
I know Trump is just uniquely Trump but even for him this is getting pretty out there.
Jesweez
8d ago
Objectively he spends nearly 100% of his time promoting right wing ideas
To be fair he throws in some space stuff as well
Jesweez
9d ago
You’re not really doing the “no innovations came from basic publicly funded scientific research” thing?
Let’s just take biology: CRISPR, the polymerase chain reaction, green fluorescent protein, huge numbers of basic discoveries that inform things like cancer therapy research, discoveries of new classes of drug such as discovering GLP-1s in Gila Monster saliva, surely one could write a book on all the contributions of the last couple decades.
That’s a ridiculous opinion that basic science with the support of public funding hasn’t contributed anything lately.
I do fear for my area of study to be honest.
To doxx myself, I study ecosystems with satellites. I develop models that link what we see in earth observation pixels with how much water is in vegetation.
The problem is that this is something which is verifiably being changed due to climate change, and with that I’m now in political waters.
I think earth science is definitely on the chopping block. Doesn’t seem to be in republicans vision of what we should invest in as a country.
Jesweez
9d ago
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..
Jesweez
11d ago
Do you think citizens in Afghanistan suffered hardship during the US occupation?
Seems like something that’s still in place today to an extent.
People of the multinational upper class often feel more kinship with one another even though they’re from different countries than they do with the lower class people in their own country.
This is honestly true in my own life. I’m in grad school. My friends are from all over the world. I have a lot more in common with them although they’re from Iran and China and Ecuador than I do with people even in my own family in the US who never left their hometown and whose thinking and interests in life are very foreign to my own.
It’s sort of a self sorting by intellect and interests.
I gather this is what is meant by “globalists”.
the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language
Is what the intelligent wing of the modern right wants basically equivalent to what the old European nationalists were trying to do?
Jesweez
11d ago
It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects
It’s funny you said this because as I was reading I internally was thinking that everything you wrote up to this point I could barely distinguish from a socialist.
Jesweez
11d ago
That’s like saying, well your relatives aren’t in the taliban, how would a prolonged counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan even effect them?
Jesweez
13d ago
Yes. I have family there through marriage. This would be pretty much the worst thing to happen in my adult life, for my country to invade the country of the other half of my family.
Jesweez
13d ago
Latin American countries tend to be very centralized and tend to have large amounts of territory where the state has very little presence, direct analogy to what the American West was like back in the day.
In addition to the vast desert regions of the north, another factor is that Mexico is one of the most consistently mountainous countries in the world. The entire country is basically two large mountain chains with some major population centers in different valleys in the central region.
There’s a reason that what El Salvador did is extremely hard to replicate in other Latin American countries. El Salvador is basically a large city state centered on San Salvador, while a country like Mexico is in a whole different universe of challenges for any similar approach.
Yeah, and then the cartels move shop to Colombia and we invade Colombia, then they move to Peru and we invade Peru, another global war on terror, another trillion dollars playing whack a mole for a decade plus, just to get outlasted once again and withdrawal, hooray
Jesweez
21d ago
I’m not sure, submitting this for research purposes:
Jesweez
23d ago
I think we should at least mandate that tech companies provide the ability to opt out of maximally addictive features.
For example, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, to an extent X, basically every social app has adopted the “infinite scroll of short video reels” that makes TikTok so addictive.
You used to be able to opt out of automatically being shown “shorts” on YouTube. However, they’ve taken away that option.
Instagram, used to be a place where photography enthusiasts post their pictures. Now it’s an attention on screen maximizer using algorithmic suggestions and infinite scroll short videos.
I read a book recently which if anyone is curious I can link the name, but basically identified that a problem with the digital age is that all of our digital tools and utilities come built in with distraction maximizing features. An article tries to shove 3 videos and 4 advertisements with maximally weird looking photos in my face while I read it. A currency exchange rate app is showing me ads. Everything that I do is trying to grab and divert my attention.
Some people say it’s choice, e.g. it’s my choice to use instagram for example. And I could always go for a dumb phone. Yes, but. The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment. And I believe we should mandate the ability to opt out of addiction and attention maximizing features on the tools and the so called town squares of our digital age.
Jesweez
28d ago
Source?
I don’t think the problem is that they depleted all the reservoirs.
Jesweez
28d ago
The reservoirs are currently near full, everyone saying that this this the problem is plainly pushing a political agenda instead of trying to understand the world around them.
Jesweez
29d ago
Yep, if anything I’d expect the headline shared to work to increase the number of firefighters not decrease it?
Trying to target new demographics who typically don’t go for those jobs, sounds pretty cool.
I agree, but this negates what is often used as a point to discredit the claim that climate change plays some role in recent extreme wildfires.
I often point to figure D from the paper I linked, showing that there’s an incredibly tight relationship between annual area burned and atmospheric aridity (measured as vapor pressure deficit).
And in fact, we know very well that increasing continental vapor pressure deficit extremes is a key aspect of climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51305-w
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD025855
I’ve seen a lot of the back and forth rhetoric about the conditions in California right now. One side, it’s climate change! The other, it’s homeless camps who are lighting fires!
All I know is that Southern California is currently experiencing their second lowest winter (wet season) rainfall totals in 150 years of record keeping and then the Santa Ana winds arrived.
https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/01/california-rain-drought-north-south/
That drought may or may not be related to climate change, but these type of scenarios almost always have an angle where the climate is playing a primary role, for one reason or another.
Jesweez
29d ago
Why do all these outbreaks of mass arson seem to occur exactly when there is historically extreme fire weather conditions?
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10279345
Are they that competent to plan exactly when the conditions on the fire triangle are perfect and then go out to set fires together?
Same thing with the Canadian fires in 2023. Apparently there was this historically unique epidemic of arsonists setting fires all through the boreal forest even deep into the north country exactly when the climate conditions were extraordinarily prone to wildfire.
Jesweez
29d ago
It’s easier to do in Florida because the climate there isn’t conducive to explosive out of control fires, so there’s less risk.
I live in Arizona where we do a ton of prescribed fire, it’s taken very seriously. Still though, it’s risky out west. Half of the iconic mountain here is bare of trees because a prescribed fire got out of control a few years ago.
A lot of care is taken to only burn during certain conditions. Still, it can sometimes get away from the crews who are out there burning.
Nonetheless, kudos to Florida, it is a good thing.
Jesweez
29d ago
Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).
It’s also true that almost all groups have at one point or another enslaved other peoples to our own benefit at some point historically.
But now in the modern world, we ideally don’t accept that behavior anymore, and we celebrate when slavers get their teeth kicked in. (You might be able to point to some modern slavers who seem to be getting a free pass, but I think it’s hard to doubt that modern people generally would celebrate to see them get their comeuppance and their enterprise dismantled).
Similarly, people who wage wars of conquest in the modern world, they often get ganged up on and it’s a modern value to celebrate at them getting their teeth kicked in.
Sometimes it’s hard, e.g. they have nuclear weapons or something. But boy, modern people often love to slap people who wage wars of conquest and that’s a pretty cool and adaptive recent novelty in human geopolitical behavior.
I think that’s probably true and it’s some weird epiphenomenon of the human condition for whatever reason.
It doesn’t mean I’m going to cheer on the slide back into it.
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