MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.
Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I don't think that WW1 is a good analogy for anything going on in modern international relations. The fundamental fact about the international situation immediately before and (to a lesser extent) during WW1, which was well-understood by contemporaries, is the existence of multiple (between five and nine depending on how you count) Great Powers each of which was capable (both in terms of military power and institutional decision-making capacity) of acting independently in pursuit of its own interests, including forming and breaking alliances based on mutual interest. The only constraint on the of a Great Power is the possible opposition of other Great Powers.
@georgioz provides a long list of Great Power conflicts in the period between 1815 (the last great International Peace Conference where the then-existing Great Powers redrew the map of Europe and agreed ground rules among themselves) and 1914 - and critically not all of them are Allies vs Central Powers. You can argue about who much the UK/France/Russia vs Germany/Austria line-up results from choices made by statesmen vs. unavoidable strategic logic vs. shared values/culture, but we can see Italy and the Ottoman Empire choosing sides based on a (possibly wrong, but genuinely attempted) calculation of strategic advantage, as well as a (somewhat dysfunctional) decision-making process where the UK decides whether or not to honour the alliance with France and the guarantee to Belgium and join the war based on a calculation of its perceived advantage.
There is a reason why board games simulating pre-1914 real-world conflict tend to be multiplayer, but board games simulating post-1914 politics tend to be two player.
After Pearl Harbour, we see two models of the world, neither of which feature Great Powers. The "US hegemony" paradigm sees all states as either US clients or as rogue states. US diplomacy is more like managing troublesome vassals in Crusader Kings than, well, Diplomacy. The "United Nations vs Axis of Evil" paradigm sees the goodies as a grand alliance held together by shared values (NOT mutual interest) and where goodie countries nominally commit to not acting unilaterally in pursuit of their own selfish interests. The Axis of Evil tends to be treated as a single unified "them" even when it isn't. (Incidentally, this model provides an easy explanation of what went wrong with W's foreign policy - W thought that he was facing an Axis of Evil when in fact Iran, Iraq and al-Quaeda were different rogue states which happened to be annoying him at the same time).
Who are the plausible Great Powers nowadays? The US is still something more than one Great Power among others. China counts. Russia looks like a Great Power, but their ineptitude in Ukraine strongly suggests that they are a fake and gay Great Power. The UK and France probably still have the military power to be Great Powers (the Falklands war was the last time this was put to the test), but American hegemony is sufficiently real that (since Suez) the British and French elites think that they can't act without American permission, and accordingly neither country has the institutional capacity. (One of the reasons why British national-greatness conservatives supported Brexit was because they thought that this loss of capacity was caused by EU membership, but in fact the UK only joined the EU after we had realised that we had already lost Great Power status). India might be a latent Great Power but doesn't act like one. Germany and Japan have intentionally eschewed Great Power status. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are strategically irrelevant - the B and S in BRICS are there by diplomatic courtesy. The only other candidate as I see it is Turkey.
Nobody thinks Diplomacy is being played in Ukraine. The Biden administration think they are trying to talk sense into a nuclear toddler. The Europeans are passively choosing whether to contribute the the American strategy or not - it turns out that the British and French can't even give the Ukrainians missiles without American permission. The Russians think they are playing Twilight Struggle like the old times, but they are actually playing Panzer General, badly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
While I agree that the inter-war Polish leadership played their bad hand badly, I don't see what the likely good outcome for Poland or the Poles is if you assume that Hitler's grand strategy was to pursue Grossreich and Lebensraum - which is what Hitler had said his grand strategy was when speaking to sympathetic audiences ever since he wrote Mein Kampf. Grossreich, even in its benign form of reversing Versailles, implies the annexation by Germany of the parts of western Poland with large ethnic-German minorities and the reduction of the ethnic Polish population of that territory to second-class citizenship. And the available Lebensraum was either in Poland or beyond it. If Poland allies with Hitler, the eventual double-cross is even more overdetermined than Barbarossa was.
Quite apart from Hitler's designs on Poland itself, any timeline where Hitler eventually attacks the Soviet Union involves Poland being ravaged by the German army on the way out and the Soviet army on the way back. This includes the scenario where Poland allies with the Soviet Union - the fact that Barbarossa happened in our timeline is strong evidence that Hitler would have invaded Soviet-allied Poland, particularly as Poland doesn't benefit from the Anglo-French guarantee in this scenario and the Spanish Civil War is a precedent that no Western country is likely to kick up a fuss if Hitler attacks Communists. Realistically, without western help Nazi Germany curbstomps the Soviets, but even if you rate the Red Army as better ex ante than it turns out ex post the best outcome is that the Soviets successfully defend Poland and Poland ends up de facto occupied by Soviets. The only reason Finland gets Soviet client-state status on as generous terms as they do is that they demonstrated the ability to give the Soviets a bloody nose, something the Poles don't have.
So to get a good outcome, you need Hitler to stop. And you pretty much need him to stop voluntarily - the way things played out in our timeline is strong evidence that the process of making him stop probably involves armies crossing Poland in a way which is catastrophic for the civilian population. The military scenario where Britain and France take the initiative in the phony war period and quickly defeat Germany isn't plausible militarily, and even if it was there was nothing Poland could do to make it more likely. Once you accept that, Polish policy looks sane (though incompetent).
In any case, if you don't count Holocausted Jews then Poland's death toll is in the normal range for eastern Europe. One of the dirty secrets of Polish history is that the pre-war Polish government would not have counted Holocausted Jews when evaluating their own performance.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson.
You are projecting post-1945 American hegemony back into the past.
We can argue about whether or not Woodrow Wilson was bad, but he definitely wasn't "the" bad guy because he wasn't a first-tier player. The European Great Powers went to war with each other without taking American policy into account, because they thought the most likely scenario was a short war of maneuver and there was nothing the US could do to affect the results of one. Even had they expected a long war, they would have (correctly) assumed US neutrality absent an exceptionally stupid provocation by the Central Powers.
The first meaningful opportunity for the US to meddle in WW1 (apart from selling materiel to the Allies on normal commercial terms) is when Bethmann Hollweg asks Woodrow Wilson to convene an international peace conference on the basis of status quo ante in December 1916. By this point the bloodiest battles of WW1 (Verdun and the Somme) had already been fought. And Wilson doesn't take the bait at this point - he correctly realises that neither side wanted a status quo ante peace in 1916. (Bethmann Hollweg was trying to maneuver out of situation where German domestic politics would force the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which he opposed on the mostly-correct basis that if it worked it would bring the US in).
The first time the US actually meddles in WW1 is the publication of the Fourteen Points, which happens after the February Revolution in Russia, at which point the messy collapse of Tsarist Russia is already priced and can be added to the "harms of WW1 definitely not Wilson's fault" pile.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Take, for example, the 10% of the private sector that works at nonprofits (up from approximately 0% in 1960). Many of them are quite stupid indeed.
Most employees of non-profits are employed by large service-providing non-profits with the largest single group being universities and university hospital systems. I don't think that academics and healthcare workers are "quite stupid indeed". The annoying wowzer subset of nonprofits is a lot less than 10% of employees.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Generally "the Holocaust" is used by historians to refer only to the murder of Jews.
Wikipedia agrees with you but I was (in the UK in the 1990s) taught in school that the Holocaust included gypsies and homosexuals.
The Germans avoid this question by calling the memorials in Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism without using the word "Holocaust". (The latter is a recent renaming - when I went there circa 2013 the English-language signage still called it the Memorial to the Murdered Gypsies of Europe)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
This is a slight exaggeration - the actual legionary army (i.e. excluding locally recruited auxiliaries who weren't available for service outside their own province) peaked at 400-500k in the 2nd century. And Byzantium was still able to field 300k men until they lost most of their high-quality agricultural land to the Islamic conquests. The first European monarch to field an army of that size is Louis XIV. Louis XIV's army was better equipped than the legions, but worse trained.
But the big picture is correct. In terms of social technology, Western Civilisation didn't recover from the Fall of Rome until the Early Modern Era (In terms of physical technology, we had overtaken Rome by the High Middle Ages - the Romans couldn't have built a Gothic cathedral and didn't have spinning wheels).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
If you grew up in the era when people still read newspapers or watched local news on TV (i.e. you were born before about 1990) then if-it-bleeds-it-leads media incentives meant that you were subject to intensive coverage of lurid crimes and a media narrative that crime is out of control. This narrative was completely unresponsive to the large drop in crime in the 1990's, with the result that low-information voters think that crime continued to increase, and use this fact to justify cocooning their kids. You could live somewhere as peaceful as the Zurich suburbs and still fill a local media crime blotter with sufficiently lurid stories that crime would be out of control in the minds of people who consume media crime coverage, and a crucial part of the education of a blue triber is understanding this.
Even if it was true, "One Haitian immigrant in one small town killed and ate their neighbours cat" being signal-boosted nationally by partisan media is exactly the sort of crime coverage that blue tribers have learned to tune out, and frankly that everyone should have learned to tune out.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I think ubiquitous intoxicant use is bad for society, and if I reluctantly think that we could suppress alcohol or marijuana we should. I could use either drug responsibly but I can see the damage caused by irresponsible use all around me, and the net cost to society dramatically exceeds the benefit. Empirically the easiest way to destroy public trust in the law is to selectively enforce drug laws against the outgroup, even if this actually targets problem users, so if you care about Rule of Law the choice is between ubiquitous use or a Singapore style serious crackdown.
The best argument for distinguishing marijuana and alcohol is a practical one about enforceability. Alcohol is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by a sufficiently large number of respectable otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to drinkers (see Prohibition). Marijuana hasn't got there yet except in a few places like Colorado, and it is important to make sure it doesn't.
FWIW I don't buy this. I think that marijuana is sufficiently easy to produce and sufficiently built into Blue Tribe culture via the hippy-to-liberal-elite pipeline that the battle is lost and a serious attempt to enforce marijuana laws would turn into another Prohibition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Major career decisions
- Overestimating how much ScienceTM still worked like it did back when Richard Feynmann was still alive, causing me to waste five years of my life doing a PhD rather than going into finance straight out of undergrad.
- Thinking that the 2009 rebound in conventional bank-based finance careers would continue and therefore not making more effort to jump into fintech before my skillset developed in a way which makes that difficult to do now.
Politics
- I supported the Iraq War on the basis that Blair's career wouldn't survive being caught lying about WMD (false), that if he was lying the risk of getting caught was very high (true), and that therefore he must be telling the truth (false conclusion follows from false premise). I also assumed that the Bush Jr foreign policy and national security team would be competent, because the exact same group of people were competent when they were the Bush Sr team dealing with the messy collapse of the Soviet Union.
- I over-estimated how damaging minimum wages could be - the UK minimum wage is now at a level that I assumed would cause French-style unemployment, but empirically it hasn't done.
Race heresies
- I thought that black African immigrants in London would be worse neighbours than black Caribbean immigrants because of the greater cultural distance and the fact that the source countries are more shitholey. In fact the Africans are better neighbours (and employees) because the process by which they got into the country was more selective.
- I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them. (For the avoidance of doubt, they are much less powerful than left-wing anti-semites think they are).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
"Holocaust" implies deliberate killings in the gas chambers, or deliberate worked-to-death-with-short-rations in the concentration camps. This applies uncontroversially to the Jews and the Roma (of whom only about 300,000 were holocausted).
My understanding (I am not an expert) is that several million non-Jewish Poles died due to war-related famine, but without the requisite intent on the part of the Nazis to be included in the Holocaust. If you count Nazi deaths as generously as anti-communists count communist deaths, the 11 million civilians killed by Nazis is roughly correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
5 Flags is the idea that there are 5 different aspects of your life and you need to choose which jurisdiction to put each of them into separately for different reasons. Four of the five flags are citizenship, primary residence, country of incorporation of your business, and country where you keep your high-balance bank accounts. What the fifth is depends on whether the person selling the idea is focussing on the digital nomad lifestyle (divide "residence" into the country where you do business and the country where you spend money), aggressive tax avoidance (game residency rules to separate tax residence from physical residence) or protection from instability (in which case the country where your non-financial assets are physically located becomes the fifth flag).
In all cases, an important part of the scheme is that each flag should go in a jurisdiction which offers hosting of that particular flag as a service to rich foreigners without any associated civic obligations. Another point is that putting too many flags in the same country is risky in case that country decides it doesn't want you any more, and that the best case is to have a second jurisdiction as a ready backup for each flag as well.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
DeSantis' problem is that he assumed that Trump had self-destructed on Jan 6th 2021 and was planning to succeed him, not to replace him. Had Trump not run, I think this would have worked and DeSantis would have been the nominee with broad MAGA support. But (at least from the perspective of Republican primary voters) Trump hadn't self-destructed and DeSantis acting as if he had was seen as disloyalty. In Q4 2023 DeSantis is very clearly floundering because he doesn't know whether he is doing a Vivek-style understudy run to position himself if Trump has a stroke before the election, or if he is running to beat Trump.
In other words, MAGA rejected DeSantis, not the other way round.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Most of us would trust our immediate family to make the correct decision in these grey areas more than we trust the legislature. Given the general views of conservative Republicans on family values and the trustworthiness of the government, it is odd that the conservative movement thinks that this particular deeply personal decision needs to be taken once-and-for-all by politicians who don't have to live with the consequences, but the nature of American coalitional politics is what it is.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I didn’t even perceive it as tongue in cheek. I used to read the Bible and be incredulous that anyone would participate in child sacrifice. Seems to be absurd in so many directions: so cruel, paints the sacrificers in the worst possible light, is evolutionarily unfit.
Remember that until the 2nd half of the 19th century, "Not all the children will make it, child death is just part of life" was one of the harsh truths of life in a fallen world. "Save every child!" was an absurd blasphemy against Gnon until it wasn't.
Given that child sacrifices peaked in times of drought and famine, I suspect it was a way of putting a positive spin on "I will share my limited supplies of food between the subset of my children that I can expect to keep alive."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Historically no. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world and much of human history up until surprisingly recent times.
Baby farming - i.e. infanticide for profit by plausibly deniable neglect as a service - was commonplace in the UK until we got rich enough to be concerned about it in the 1870s-1890s.
The idea that we should keep unwanted babies alive comes after the idea that we can keep wanted babies alive. And that requires industrial civilisation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The subset of American self-identified Christians who actually believe in Jesus Christ uncomplicatedly do believe that Christian charity extends to unfortunates all across the world. American charitable spending on 3rd world development is the highest in the world about 0.23% of GDP and most of that goes through Christian charities (WorldVision is the biggest, and is widely respected as effective in the development NGO world even if people don't like their links to American Christianity). This doesn't count spending on missionary work, some of which ends up being diverted into philanthropy as well.
The cognitive dissonance only affects the people who self-define as "Christian" for Red Tribe identity politics reasons without accepting Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and saviour. Regrettably, this is not a small group, and the churches that welcome them are therefore able to make a lot of noise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The story wouldn't have gone viral if it was about geese. People love cats and dogs almost as much as they love kids. Normies don't care about geese.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Yes. But this still means that US Swifties are a sufficiently large, rabid fandom that with a quantity supplied of 64 sold-out US stadium concerts (i.e. something like 4 million tickets) the market-clearing price is high enough that travelling intercontinentally is preferable to paying it.
Will the endorsement move votes. Probably not because nothing does, but it is less unlikely than most other things. There are not many swing voters left in America, but my best guess is that they are overrepresented among Swifties. Remember that Swift grew up Red Tribe (childhood in small-town PA, teen years in the Nashville country scene) and has not done anything that would alienate her Red Tribe fans. Since she switched from country to pop, her music clearly has cross-tribal appeal. And if the Democratic theory of change is correct, Red Tribe women whose identity is not primarily Christian are a key swingable demographic.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
You can do better than that in a live debate - obviously competitive debaters do. "Ignore the question and just say your piece" is Media Interviews 101 though, and politicians do a lot more interviews than debates so it is the approach they are most comfortable with.
When I was a student politician, I did the Party training course on media interviews 101, and the line was that (unless you are important enough to insist on a live interview) broadcast media will record 3-4x as much material as needed and only broadcast the gaffes, so ignoring the questions and repeating your soundbite is a necessary defensive technique against deceptive editing. "When is it safe to answer the question?" is 201-level stuff.
Looking at the incentives facing the journo, broadcast media interviews are all about inducing the gaffe (except for the hard-to-get big ticket interview like a US President or an A-lister where it is all about giving a softball interview so other big interviewees will agree to be interviewed by you). My mother has a horror story about how a BBC interviewer started interviewing her in French (which she speaks, but not well enough to do an unprepared media interview), stopped after about 1 minute and said it was actually a sound check, and then started the real interview while she was still in "desperately trying to code-switch" mode.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA.
Deep Throat was Deputy Director of the FBI. You can argue that the FBI and CIA were working together against the White House, but that argument needs to be made - conventional wisdom is that the FBI and CIA are outgroup to each other within the internal politics of the US Deep State. To say that Deep Throat was working for the CIA is obviously silly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
"Is able to threaten to destroy a building with sufficient credibility that nobody invests a large sum of money building it" is a very, very low bar. "Is able to build the things it wants to build" is a much higher bar.
Nimbystan has higher state capacity than countries which can't prevent unauthorised construction at all, but lower state capacity than countries that can choose whether or not to build things and execute on either decision.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The best outcome for Harris, and also the most likely outcome where the debate makes a large difference (I agree with other commentators that the debate is unlikely to change anything and that the most likely outcome is that both candidates have been effectively sedated by their teams and we get a mediocre snoozefest where nobody takes risks), is that she manages to put Trump on tilt and he spends a large part of the debate rambling incoherently. Double points if he rambles incoherently about the 2020 election because that makes him look like a bad loser.
I don't know what are the best attacks to put Trump on tilt, but I assume Harris has people on her team who do have an idea. The critical point is that the target audience is Trump, not the people watching on TV. The cliche one is to talk about how small his hands are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.
I don't think that Trump surrendering the the Taliban was that popular - it is just that the Republicans managed to pin the blame on Biden (who was in office when the final US pullout from Kabul was due under the surrender agreement Trump signed in Doha in Feb 2020.
FWIW, I think that Trump was right to surrender to the Taliban (there was no pro-US government in Afghanistan worth defending) and Biden was right to implement the surrender agreement rather than ratting on it the way the Deep State wanted him to. But I notice that "Biden pulled out of Kabul and bad things happened as a result" is an attack the Trump campaign are running on, notably at the Arlington press stunt, so I assume the people making the decisions think that this is a good line of attack.
Mostly under the Ottoman Empire. The Arab countries become British and French "mandates" after the Ottoman Empire is defeated in World War One. British General Allenby was the last Christian to enter Jerusalem as a conqueror in 1917. The British press promptly referred to him as the "last crusader".
More options
Context Copy link