MadMonzer

MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 1d ago

Thanks, I did not realize that Moscow was that close.

To the point where the Prigozhin mutiny was able to get from the Ukrainian border to the outskirts of Moscow in force in about 12 hours. Admittedly they were not opposed in the way NATO would be.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 2d ago

I am inclined to agree - the Ukrainian border is slightly closer to Moscow than the Finnish or Latvian borders, but not by much. And obviously St Petersburg is closer to NATO now than it would be if Ukraine had been allowed to join. But the question isn't what we think - it is what Moscow thinks. And Putin has repeatedly said that he sees NATO troops in Ukraine as a Soviet-nukes-in-Cuba tier security threat. (While saying, out of the other side of his mouth, that he wants to conquer Ukraine because it is in some sense supposed to be Russian).

I don't think the Mearsheimer realist explanation of Russia's behaviour is correct - I think Putin wants to invade and conquer Ukraine and forcibly Russianise the Ukrainian people because he is a Russian nationalist and that is where his Russian nationalism takes him. But a lot of people (including, importantly, key people in the Trump administration) do buy it. And in any case Putin negotiates in the same way whether Ukrainian "neutrality" is about honestly held security concerns or whether it is a bad-faith move to isolate Ukraine in preparation for a repeat invasion.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 2d ago

But, of course, humans are not made to be virgins until 25; we reach sexual maturity in our teens. That is when we are meant to start having sex and becoming independent of our parents. Instead, we rot in classrooms memorizing random trivia and practicing useless skills, enforced by a legal and social regime that views teen marriage and teen labor as barbaric abuse.

Young men and women in cisHajnal cultures did not get married as teens. The average age of first marriage for the working and middle class was mid-twenties with small age gaps being the norm. The 1950's model of marrying your high school sweetheart at 19 was an artifact of the extraordinary wealth (relative to expectations formed during the Great Depression and WW2) of 1950's America enabling early marriage.

"You can't expect people to go without sex for a decade from puberty to marriage" had been refuted by 1600. (Premarital sex was common, but only among people who were ready and willing to be shotgun-married if necessary).

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 2d ago

and offer Ukraine vague European security guarantees

This is the rub. Russia has always cared more about Ukrainian "neutrality" than they do about the exact position of the border - the demands immediately before the invasion related to "neutrality" and not territory, and the Istanbul negotiations broke down over the issue. Russia has said that troops from NATO countries in Ukraine is a red line - and if you accept the Mearsheimer realist view of Russian goals then it should be one. If they are willing to accept peacekeepers from European NATO countries then that is a major move. And the vagueness from the Trump administration on this point suggests that they are not. And on the flip side, Ukraine has no incentive to accept a deal that doesn't leave them more defensible than they are now, given the risk of Russia reneging and restarting the war in the future.

The hard part of negotiating a Russia-Ukraine deal is the security arrangements. By default any arrangement which makes it easier for NATO to defend Ukraine from a Russian attack in future is something that could, in theory, make it easier for NATO to attack Russia from Ukrainian territory. If the security arrangements are TBD (as they have to be if the countries that will actually be guaranteeing Ukraine's security were excluded from the negotiations) then there isn't a deal.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 2d ago

Ukraine as a people definitely can't survive Russian victory - Putin has made clear that he considers Ukrainians to be misguided Russians who need to be forcibly shown which country they actually belong to, and is implementing this policy in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 3d ago

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

I would say the second Klan was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black. By the time the second Klan was founded in 1915 the racial issue had basically been won by the racists, Jim Crow was firmly in place, and there was no need for an extralegal anti-Black organisation similar to the first Klan. The strongest second Klan state organisation was in Indiana, where there were no Blacks to oppress.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 9d ago

Tariffs are a tool, not a policy. The policy that was being implemented by the Trump tariffs was not a policy to reindustrialise the US and isolate China.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 9d ago

Excessive rents in tier-1 metro areas (even for poor-quality accommodation in less-good neighbourhoods) is a near-universal problem and near-universally recognised as a problem. So I don't think this is a "doomed because not following my preferred policy" issue - it is a "doomed because universally recognised problem is not being solved" issue (although the simplest solution would be to adopt my preferred policy and increase housing supply). Certainly my intent when stating the proviso to exclude issues like "taxes too high" or "you can't own a gun" where the question of whether there is a problem at all is controversial.

The problem is worse in the UK and Ireland than in Continental Europe, but Barcelona, Paris, and Frankfurt all show the classic pattern, with the same retarded political response as London or San Francisco.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 9d ago

Ignoring the "Europe is doomed because they are not following my preferred policy" style of arguments, the big ones are:

The fertility crisis among the productive classes in Europe is worse than the US (but not as bad as first-world Asia)
Europe is not self-sufficient in food or energy
The places in Europe you can go to escape the NIMBY cities are much less attractive than Texas.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 9d ago

Agreeing with @Skibboleth - I don't think the exact nature of the Danegeld being requested is the point - the question is whether paying the Danegeld delivers any relief from the Dane or not.

If Harvard's read of what happened to Columbia (I don't understand the detail of the deal, but I assume Harvard do) is that they caved and the Trump admin immediately came back for more then they the only demands they should concede are to do things they wanted to do anyway but couldn't for internal politics reasons.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 10d ago

and the lack of the soon-to-boil-over extreme ethnoreligious tensions present in the UK/France/Germany/Benelux

It remains the case that ADOS blacks are more numerous and more troublesome than any of the troublesome minorities in western European countries. The nearest thing to an exception is North African Arabs in France - differential fertility means that they are 16% and rising of French babies (vs 12% and falling of the US being ADOS blacks) - so this statement will not be true of France in 20 years' time unless there is signifiant assimilation.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 10d ago

I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.

Sokal rather famously published a paper discussing (among other aspects of the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) the inadequacy of the Axiom of Choice to solve the problems caused by females being the ones who gestate and breastfeed as part of a more general example of the inadequacy of liberal solutions to solve the problems of kyriarchy. It got published in a formerly respectable journal, too.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 11d ago

The Court doesn't need to decide hypothetical cases (and, indeed, is prohibited from doing so by Article III of the Constitution). The Court has to decide the instant case, where the prisoners are being held by El Salvador on the instructions and at the expense of the United States.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

FWIW, it remains an unsolved question to what extent the President can bypass the Congressional power to declare war by simply ordering a surprise attack.

Should be may. Regardless of what the Constitution says or means, the President can do that if and only if the armed forces will reliably obey the order, which was what I was thinking about.

If the political feelings of the officer corps were such that the armed forces would reliably obey an order to launch a surprise invasion of Greenland, I suspect Meyers would not have done what she did.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

Also, if you are using the fall of the Roman Republic as an example, the impact of the so-called Marian reforms (I am not qualified to engage in the ancient history nerds' argument about how much Marius is actually to blame) is fundamental, and has no US equivalent. The Roman Republic became vulnerable to military coups (of which Marius' re-election as consul was the first de facto and Sulla's was the first de jure, and which continued even under the Emperors) because the citizens' army (with military service linked to voting rights in the centuriate assembly) was replaced with a long-service professional army drawn from the proles, with legions which were in practice personally loyal to their generals.

The US armed forces swear their oaths to the Constitution. While there is considerable debate about whether the Constitution is living or dead, we all agree that even if alive it lacks the necessary skills to command troops. So if the downward spiral continues much further the question becomes "Who do the troops actually take orders from?" To pick a topical example, Col Meyers thinking she could get away with her insubordinate display in Greenland suggests that there is a broad consensus among the officer corps that an order by President Trump to launch a surprise attack on an ally would not be obeyed.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

The classical Gold Standard didn't slide into fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking was baked into it from the start - the Bank of England was founded in 1694 with the explicit mission of generating a float that would be lent to the Crown in order to fund the rebuilding of the Royal Navy.

You can download historical data on the BoE balance sheet here. I calculated the bullion-to-base-money reserve ratio by dividing "Coin and bullion" assets (column O) by the sum of "Notes in circulation" (column S) and "Bankers' deposits" (column AE - this is commercial bank reserves viewed as liabilities of the central bank). The ratio oscillates between 60% and 80% during the classical Gold Standard era (roughly 1844-1914 in the UK), drops during WW1, returns to the target range in the 1920's, and then goes off a cliff due to Depression-era money printing.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

The promise of hard money is that individuals can accumulate wealth by saving without needing to invest. Since society as a whole cannot do this, hard money systems are inherently unstable. They normally end with a coalition of indebted warriors and merchants liquidating the token-hoarders when the burden of trading real resources for tokens becomes intolerable.

The majority of the population who are not bitcoin speculators have no reason to hand over $3 trillion of real economic value to bitcoin speculators, so they probably won't.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

In addition, almost every local authority in the UK except Birmingham has contracted out rubbish collection. Although the original reason for doing this was to bust the unions, it has the added advantage that binmen are not available to predatory lawyers as a comparator group for an equal pay claim.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

Republican boomers don't march next to atomwaffenfront or "put their white bodies on the line to protect brave young people doing Direct Action." The right doesn't have the organization or ideological discipline to use confused and wishy washy boomers as pawns.

That is mostly because the Republicans don't normally use marches and demos as a political tactic. (They work much better for movements with an urban base.) The last time they did was on Jan 6th 2021, and there were absolutely Republican boomers protesting peacefully on the Ellipse and Capitol lawn while Proud Boys and groypers were ransacking Nancy Pelosi's office.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

the America of the Founders

The more American history I read, the more I think this is a misleading concept. The way I see it is that the Founding Fathers didn't found America - both in the sense that America already existed (founded by the Pilgrim Fathers et al.) and in the sense that the United States established in 1789 wasn't a nation-state.

The Founding Fathers were founding a sovereign state (in the technical international law sense of that term) that was itself a federation of sovereign States (in the sense of the States in 1789 being separate free self-governing political communities). They were building political institutions, and in order to do so they deliberately punted on three questions that go to the heart of "what is America as a country?" The first is the slavery question, which we all know about. As it turned out, America couldn't remain a country without resolving that question, and I don't think that would have surprised the founders. The second is the democracy question. The 1789 Constitution deliberately doesn't establish a right to vote - the founders were agnostic as to whether the republic they were establishing would be democratic or oligarchic. But by the Jackson administration the fact that America is a democracy is part of the national identity and rolling back universal white, male suffrage would be unthinkable. And the third was the religion question (both in the sense of "Is America a Christian nation or just a nation where the population happens to be majority-Christian?" and in the sense of "What does it mean to be a Christian country when you are committed to neutrality between mutually excommunicate Christian denominations?"), which America is still successfully punting on.

Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union. It became a country as a result of the Monroe and Jackson administrations.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 14d ago

Still says "Gulf of Mexico" from non-US IPs. Still called the "Gulf of Mexico" by everyone who isn't trying to pass a retarded loyalty test. I don't think the workers of the world were united in Havel's Czechoslovakia either, regardless of what the greengrocer said.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 15d ago

Equity index futures are not a new thing. The first S&P 500 index future was traded in 1982.

Financial professionals don't take the Dow particularly seriously as an index, and there were practical advantages to concentrating trading in a single US large-cap index, which is why Dow index futures were not traded until 2015.

I suspect the reason why there used to be less coverage of equity index futures markets in the non-specialist media is the development of the 24hr news cycle - it was only recently that a journalist (or citizen journalist) would need to report on equity markets when the stock exchange was closed.

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Historical European Martial Arts

MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 15d ago

though in latter years the focus transitioned from historical reconstruction to maximizing tournament-effectiveness.

Interesting - I would have assumed that the historical masters had refined their styles to be close to optimum given the weapons available. Does tournament-effective differ from historical because modern fencers have better techniques than the historical masters, or because there is something artificial about modern tournaments which mean that historical combat-optimised techniques are not tournament-optimal?

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 16d ago

geographical indicators

The geographical indicator row is not primarily a protectionist one - the EU is demanding that other countries protect geographical names so that (for example) American winemakers can't call their Champagne-style sparkling wines "Champagne" in the US domestic market. The GI row is analogous to IP rows which end up as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.

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