RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
You're too harsh on Sanderson I think. Sanderson is not on the level of HP slashfic. Go on AO3. You will See Things there and thoroughly reassess your opinions about writing quality.
Not much happens in Way of Kings. That's standard in fantasy. There is maybe 100 pages in the first book of the Wheel of Time where nothing happens. There is an entire book of filler in the Wheel of Time.
Books 1-3 of Stormlight were fine with moments of excellence, only by Book 4 does it degenerate into therapy-slop and an ass-pull twist. Also too much MCU inter-cosmere crossover stuff.
Yet any man or group of men who learned to read would have a huge military advantage.
They have female scribes to do the reading for them? Literacy was low back in medieval times. It's no more dumb than real stuff we did like footbinding.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Why isn't it clear whether it's 100K per year or 100K lump sum? Lutnick was apparently saying annual fee. But the Press Sec says one-time payment.
https://x.com/PressSec/status/1969495900478488745
Serious failure of planning and state capacity here. Like with the tariffs where they go up and down on a whim. If you're going to implement a policy, be consistent and stable. Implement, test, review, iterate. Don't flip-flop from day to day.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them.
You're just describing how imperialism works, that's how countries get their borders. My point is that defensive violence is basically reasonable. It can't be less reasonable than offensive violence.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong. Israel routinely says it's fighting a defensive struggle for survival to justify its tactics and campaigns, to justify foreign military aid and diplomatic assistance. But they're fighting offensively.
the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders
The Israelis didn't accept those borders and rejected them, that's why they took various territories beyond '67 borders in the Six Day War. They changed those borders and have continued to cement their territorial holdings by splitting up the Palestinian held land in the West Bank, creating new settlements.
Reasonable borders are based on power and Israeli power is unstable.
Israel is not a great power due to its small size and doesn't have the luxury of prosecuting this kind of campaign, they only get away with it due to US diplomatic and military support. Without America, they would've run out of bombs to blow up Gaza with and much else besides. Without America, their missile defence would be much less effective. Without American diplomacy and aid deals their neighbours would be much more hostile. The Israeli situation is unstable, they have a high-tech economy dependent on not being sanctioned, a high-tech military dependent on US weapons, a fractious democracy unsuited for juche-style isolation.
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
The Palestinians have made bad decisions, so has Israel. There may not be much sympathy for yet another Israeli crisis where they 'need' a surge of aid and support to get out of a fix. What is their plan for China inciting trouble, getting Hamas some first-rate MANPADs, ATGMs and killer drones to drag the US into more MENA drama? What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Your “obviously unarmed” Palestinian might well be wearing a bomb
So the logical, rational thing to do is to go out, chase her down as she runs away and magdump her?
The captain didn't believe she had a bomb, he just wanted to kill this girl.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest
These narratives were justifying Palestinian hatred of Israel, which is different from saying 'They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites'. It's the same kind of difference between 'Yes the Palestinians attack Israeli civilians but that's OK because X' and 'actually, there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian, they're fighting-age men/women and due to conscription they're all military targets - anything is permitted'. The former is an attempt at some kind of moral argument excusing admitted hatred, the latter is a way to cover up actions that stem from hatred as practical necessity. If the Israelis were really so concerned about old men and women/children getting food, they wouldn't restrict food aid so much. There are many better ways to prevent crowd crush or rationalize food distribution besides machine-gun fire and artillery!
The whole concept is bizarre. Suppose the Palestinians somehow laid so many roadside bombs Israelis couldn't get food without being gruesomely maimed. Then the Palestinians say 'oh they were clearly trying to steal food, we were simply punishing thieves per age-old traditions - cutting a leg here or there with a landmine works wonders to prevent theft'. It's just adding insult to injury.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians
The key difference is that native Americans get all kinds of special privileges in America. Native Americans get special casino rights, scholarships and all kinds of affirmative action.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug. So the narrative that they're systemically oppressed doesn't hold. The US military doesn't set up 'if you come near our command post we will shoot you and then confirm the kill' zones in black neighbourhoods. If George Floyd was a 13 year old girl being shot at from long range, people here would likely have a different stance.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Killing those who try to steal food distributed in times of war and famine has happened for thousands of years, it’s critical to preventing both fatal crowd crushes
So what, the IDF machine-guns them to avoid crowd crushes??? They draw invisible, imaginary lines that, when crossed, get the Gazans shot? Come on, there's a very simple answer here. Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
The Israelis also hate the Palestinians. That's why they torture them, blow them up, steal their land, knock down their houses, use all these elaborate terror tactics, shoot them when they're unarmed and obviously no threat. They've been doing this for years, before and after the present conflict.
An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
The Palestinians sure are easy to hate. But there's no way to replace 'Israeli hatred' in the equation here. I fully imagine a skeptical mottizen might try to look into this, is there context, could he have thought she was carrying a bomb? Of course not:
After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.
Naturally the soldiers leave the command post, there's this random girl they need to kill!
Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to "lure" the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then "confirmed the kill".
"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over," he said.
Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."
At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society. Otherwise we're just left with absurdities like 'we were shooting the children with heavy machineguns and artillery so that older men wouldn't steal all the food and leave them with nothing'. The 'drug addict who gets let out of jail for the 15th time' analogy isn't appropriate, it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
Countries do this, that's how borders get made after all. But dressing it up like this is ridiculous. Israel can't have it's anti-genocide, anti-imperialist, we're just defending ourselves cake and chow down on imperial expansion, ethnic cleansing and forceful subjugation.
deeply dysgenic
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th. You'd think these high-IQ Israelis with all the most amazing gadgetry wouldn't get sneak-attacked a second time on Yom Kippur but apparently that little bit of readiness is too much to ask.
I think all this civil war talk is massively overblown.
Let's consider Russia for a moment, in the 1990s. The economy shrank 40%, looters stole much of what remained. Millions of people are unemployed in a country that has no experience with unemployment, or their wages just aren't paid. If they are paid, often they can't buy anything. There are no working social services. Life expectancy dropped 8 years. It's really, really bad.
There are some extremely dubious elections, in a country which has barely even had a chance to get used to elections. The communists (numerous and well-organized) had many very good reasons to dispute them, given that capitalism had proven to be a massive disaster thus far.
The President (a retarded drunk) had the army shell the White House with tanks. Hundreds of government representatives and officials died. There was a disastrous war in Chechnya. It was the nightmare-fantasy version of what Trump will do to America but real.
Still no civil war! Rich countries with strong bureaucracies do not have civil wars unless there are extreme circumstances. I count Russia in the 1990s as a rich country - the US is extremely rich. US security forces have many things that the Russians didn't, drones and internet surveillance. And then there are the American nuclear forces, who have many good reasons to want to stick together and resolve things peacefully.
For a civil war to happen in America, the power of the government has to be broken. At minimum, there'd need to be a decisive military defeat by China prompting an economic depression and delegitimation of traditional authorities. But even then you might just get a socialist/fascist takeover or a breakup rather than a civil war. One dead guy does not cut it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
if North Korea can be viable as a state, so can Israel
North Korea is a fully centralized totalitarian party-state, heir to centuries of cultural isolationism. Israel is incredibly unstable politically, there are routinely massive protests and huge factional divides. You could not have picked two countries any more different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
and no one in the region can do anything about it
When Iran fires missiles at Israel, there's a frantic military effort by the US and UK to defend Israel. US warships in the Persian Gulf and Med firing interceptors, US aircraft providing air defence, US bombers targeting Iran, US satellites and enablers helping Israel.
Israel is not fighting and could not fight this war alone. They've been heavily dependent on US munitions the whole time even for their 'blowing up Gaza' operation, let alone more advanced missile defence. Where are the 2000 pound bombs coming from? American arsenals. They got $20 billion in military aid/assistance in just the first year after October 7th.
Brendan Tarrant killed more people, actively posted his stream on 8chan and yet 8chan is still around, though they did a rebrand/rehost. These things just pop right back up again. Relax.
People are overhyping the assassination I think. Consider https://xkcd.com/1979/ about the assassination of President Garfield and the section of the newspaper it's in. Permanent history of the world? Immortally preserved? Few even remember who he was and he was a sitting president! The great emotion of that time is forgotten, despite its greater significance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Tangential to your main point, I don't think 9/11 should be excluded. Political violence is not normally distributed, you get a tiny spoonful most of the time. Then one day, a truck shows up and dumps tonnes of it on you.
The vast majority of terror deaths in America died in 9/11, it's not an outlier. Everything else is an outlier, basically a nothingburger in comparison. McVeigh takes a distant second place. And if you include US deaths abroad in wars, Islamic terrorism becomes even more potent. The resources going into squelching left and rightwing terror are insignificant compared with the vast resources that went into fighting Islamic terrorism/Islamism, huge contingents of the US military and national guard were actively deployed in a decades long campaign that largely failed. But it's not sexy to talk about that anymore it seems, people prefer to talk about right and left wing violence instead.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
The US weakened Al Qaeda by going after the rank and file, hammering away at them and blocking terror attacks with security. Osama Bin Laden was not key to the organization and his death had no significant affect on their capabilities. Likewise with ISIS. Killing Al-Baghdadi didn't have much effect, it was defeating their troops in their field that matters.
“This is a message to all of the Middle East.”
What would be a real message to the Middle East is if the much-vaunted Israeli army actually moves into Gaza and destroys Hamas with ground troops. Not a chevauchee where they go into one part of Gaza, blow things up and leave whereupon Hamas returns, then do it again to another part of Gaza. But if they actually attack and keep attacking until they defeat Hamas, take all weapons caches, clear out the tunnels, defeat the fighting men, then they actually win.
All this precision-strike stuff is very pretty and impressive but it doesn't actually do anything by itself. You can blow up Hamas leader A and Hamas leader B will replace him. You can blow up Osama Bin Laden and there's basically no effect. Al Qaeda trundles on, they're still doing their thing. Blow up Trump and nothing would happen, they'd just replace him. A state or any statelike entity cannot be defeated from the top down, only from the bottom-up by destroying their soldiers and their revenue sources, their territorial control.
This is why Israel remains in 'small-dog' territory, they don't seem to have this capability or at least they aren't using it when it's the sole solution to their military-political problem. All the exo-atmospheric interceptions and fancy long-range strike in the world cannot substitute for ground combat power like Ukraine or Russia have, where they take and actually hold territory after capturing it. Precision strikes are only
Israel is in a very dangerous position, doubling down on fear tactics and intimidation while lacking the actual power/will to win. I sense a 'oh but they could go in and blow up hamas and keep attacking till they win but the real plan is to keep skirmishing until the Palestinian population is reduced by starvation, bombing or migration thus letting them annex Gaza' argument and that may be the strategy but it's not politically workable. They can't blow up all the humanitarian aid lest they lose overseas support. If they get sanctioned, then Israel is sure to lose and may even collapse entirely. Small, high-tech economies require overseas market access. Sanctionproofing is impossible for such a small country.
All the stalling tactics and assassinations in the world cannot bypass the basic logic of war, you have to destroy the enemy's ability to resist, not blow up the negotiators. And it's especially dumb against a population of notorious bravery. Arabs might often be poorly led, uncoordinated and generally inferior to European troops in combat power but the guys who popularized suicide bombing as a military tactic should not be considered cowardly!
RandomRanger
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13d ago
On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.
This is storytelling from Compact Mag, it doesn't have anything to do with reality. Xi's dream is not to 'stop things from changing'. His dream is to make change, to reunite Taiwan into China and make it the most powerful country in the world, reshape the world system.
contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature
There's too much mysticism and obscurantism in discourse about transhumanism, I think at least in part because people are pattern-matching mystic, obscurantist religious dogma to transhumanism since both promise immortality and transcendent power. It's story-reasoning, not real reasoning. 'Tyrants don't want change'. Depends on the change! 'Xi Xinping wants to be immortal, as some eternal guardian of Chinese stasis'. That's fiction. Xi is a normal kind of leader. He wants more power. He wants advantageous change but not instability. The whole Marxist dialectic that Xi studies is in large part about systemic change due to technological and social development. He accepts the need to adapt.
The ideas behind transhumanism are actually based on something, it's not schizobabble. They're based on understanding of the human mind as an information system, not a soul or something forever tied to an organic body.
If you can render one person immortal, you can render many immortal. Xi Xinping is very unlikely to be so powerful that he can restrain the rest of the politburo from living together, not to mention business leaders pursuing immortality in secret. Whatever technology that allows for immortality will probably have many other economic and social effects that will likely destabilize the system and bring about new leadership dynamics. If he is so powerful as to suppress human greed for longevity, technological diffusion and economic-military-social transformations of the world, then transhumanism is secondary to whatever his personal hegemony is derived from, that's the interesting thing in this scenario.
He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs
This is a story idea. It's super abstract. I just don't see how you can call other, rooted-in-reality discussion of transhumanism childish and then write this.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."
Yeah I read that part, the 'many were murdered' part and that's what made me unhappy with the thesis. OK, the British killed some people at Amritsar. That's what state killing looks like, shooting guns. Or active collectivization where they're moving people around and intensively interfering with agriculture, or in wartime when armies pass by and loot/wreck irrigation and cause famines. That's killing/murder, or at least much closer to what we mean by murder.
by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill
I don't accept that people were dying due to the ideals of Bentham. There were no Benthamite death squads, the very idea is a contradiction.
the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 tons) of wheat, which made the region more vulnerable.
This is bad but it's not like he was sending troops to take the grain off to England. The grain export was due to the governments commitment to laissez-faire economics and practical limits on its power, as it says. The fundamental cause was that the Indian economy wasn't very developed, people who had grain didn't want to sell it to starving people who had no money, the govt had little capacity to force them to do so and didn't try very hard. So if one wants to say the British were negligent in their governance, then sure. But that's not actually murder, it's just not-saving, not-reforming the economy, not-reforming land distribution.
However, is the main standard argument for colonial rule not the idea that it results in a higher level of flourishing and prosperity for its subjects compared to the dictatorship of their native brutish elites?
Colonial rule is an innately imbalanced thing, it's about a stronger side controlling a weaker. So in a purely moral level, it's never really justified if you believe in sovereignty and autonomy of peoples.
Nevertheless, in this instance I think that the British ran India quite generously as compared to other potential rulers, foreign or local. The British could've been much more extractive and heavy-handed if they wanted. It was a British former civil servant who initially organized what became the Indian National Congress because he thought they hadn't solved the country's economic problems. The meeting was approved by the Viceroy. They could've pulled a Mao and invited people to speak freely about their opinions and then arrested anyone who opposed the government. They could've had a zero-tolerance policy for dissent. They could've forced Indians into humiliation rituals like the queue hairstyle in China.
Colonialism is basically about power dynamics, that the British were at all thinking about it as 'how can we have a cordial win-win relationship rather than a I win, you submit relationship' is a sign they really weren't that evil. Just think about the different mindsets. The British have this narrative that 'colonialism was good because we kept order, built railroads' or 'colonialism was bad because we caused famines, intruded on other people's sovereignty' where it's all coached in this moral frame. Turkey doesn't really care about any of that, their official attitude towards Armenia is closer to 'it never happened and they were enemies anyway, they had it coming, we were a great empire'. No Libyan will apologize for slave-raiding the Mediterranean coast, though they have more pressing issues. The Mongols put up statues to Genghis Khan, he's a national hero to them, not a genocidal murderer.
The British were/are uniquely concerned with the well-being of their subjects as an imperial power, it follows that they weren't that bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Can someone steelman the anti-legalization stance to me better than I've been trying to do?
The most harmful drugs are tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco and alcohol are not particularly potent, they are simply very widely consumed.
If drugs are legalized and the effects are bad, it will be difficult to recriminalize them again since there will be lobby groups and tax revenue at risk.
Drugs are usually much more potent than alcohol and tobacco, THC content in marijuana has been rising massively over time. New ones are discovered all the time - Fentanyl for instance which might be the optimal drug in cost-effective highs... but also very dangerous.
Drugs also have a risk of big systematic problems, like how Russia got extremely drunk on vodka or how the Qing empire got extremely addicted on opium. If we're entering an era of mass unemployment due to AI do we really want widely accessible drugs?
Addiction isn't just for poor losers, it can be for anyone who makes a bad decision, has the wrong friends, is just overburdened by circumstances and needs something to take the edge off and then lacks the willpower to keep it under control.
My more controversial conclusion: I think that the drug dealers should be systematically rooted out and destroyed. Find a drug dealer (if drug addicts can do this, so can police with drones, cameras, wiretapping, troops). Point a gun at him until he tells you where he got his drugs from. Go to them, point guns at them... repeat until you've gotten all the drug dealers and all domestic suppliers/importers. If they refuse to tell you, blow their heads off. If they're turning people into fentanyl zombies, they should be treated like necromancers in an RPG, inherent enemies of society. There should be a gradation of responses, the dumbass blonde girl dealing coke to upper middle class users isn't turning people into fentanyl zombies and shouldn't have her head blown off but if she doesn't reveal her supplier then keep ramping up punishment until she does. You could have creative responses like tattooing 'drug dealer' on her forehead, caning... The legal system we have isn't well-adapted to deal with large criminal gangs with large revenues and strong coercive capabilities. These are small, borderless state actors that deserve a more militarized response.
Sticking criminals in prison is not a sufficient deterrent to the gangsters 'if you snitch, we will kill you and make an example of your mutilated corpse'. Often they just end up running their gangs from prison, executing drug deals from prison, intimidating other gangs from prison. If you go to prison, you can't be so easily killed by a rival gang and you can brutalize/rape members of rival gangs who get imprisoned in prisons you control! You can exchange tricks with other career criminals and abuse prisoners who aren't career criminals or part of a gang.
None of this is working properly, it's a legalist fantasy, just going through the motions. It's a parallel to the 'let out the retarded, violent criminal after his 14th crime (he's too retarded to be held responsible) wait until after he murders some random person to crack down on him' equilibrium. No 15th chances. If he's clearly a bad guy, blow him away. Killing bad guys is actively good, not a last resort. The present bad equilibrium needs to be smashed with a major effort, then we can all enjoy a superior equilibrium.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
With the British there Russia couldn't really do that much and didn't really want to conquer India. But without the British there, it's almost free real estate like all the khanates and small states in Central Asia that Russia swallowed up. It would be a feeding frenzy like Africa. The mountains in Afghanistan are certainly a problem but not impossible to overcome, invasions were launched down from Afghanistan into India from time to time.
The Ottoman Empire, China and Japan were some of the strongest non-European states in this period and mostly avoided colonization. India was colonized and if it were not colonized by the British probably wouldn't have been that strong.
RandomRanger
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15d ago
Yeah, they game the entrance system. Canada too supposedly has a 'skills based' immigration system but like Australia it's a joke. Universities are supposed to admit people who pass a rigorous test but they're phenomenally greedy and the entrance requirement is de facto 'has money and a pulse', nevermind plagiarism or anything else. And then there are fake journal articles they write to seem smart...
Every test becomes something to game and it's hard to convince people to test rigorously if their financial interests are advanced by bringing in high fee paying foreign students. On balance I think it'd be better for universities to receive no more money from foreign students than domestics, possibly less. Right now there are perverse incentives. The university business model should be to educate the domestic talent base first rather than bring in as many foreign students as physically possible, only if there's surplus capacity should foreign students be admitted, or if there's some other special reason like exceptional talent.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
It is absolutely standard, expected practice for imperial subjects to pay for things that benefit the overlord. If they rebel, it's also expected that a larger garrison of loyal troops from the metropole will be deployed there. Control of Egypt also had a great deal to do with India since much Europe-Indian trade passed through Egypt/Suez.
Upon investigating further, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how the home charge system actually worked, with various British commissions saying more should be done to pay rebates to India. Perhaps the repayment system was more honoured in the breach than observance. Nevertheless, the fact that there was even debate about repayment being insufficient indicates that this is not harsh imperialism.
The Mughals who previously ruled India fielded a huge army, it's hard to see how the relatively small British/Indian forces based in India, around 300,000, were unduly taxing the Indian economy. The Qing fielded a million men and embarked on their own expensive indigenous naval programs. If India weren't colonized by Britain, it would likely have undertaken similar expenditure and/or get invaded by someone, resulting in an increased fiscal burden. Russia for instance spent about 30% of its budget on the military around 1900.
Likewise, it's hard to see how a few thousand British administrators running the whole country could cause famine actively, though they were not great at stopping famine. The Raj was not run like a top-down Soviet machine, rule was largely indirect and delegated to Indians. I dispute Mike Davis's 'Late Victorian Holocausts' thesis. Firstly, it's inappropriate to compare to a Holocaust since a famine isn't an organized mass killing so much as a mildly disorganized mass not-saving. Secondly, much more severe famines were occurring right next door in China in this period. India has innately inconsistent weather via the monsoons and famines will happen in a subsistence economy.
Preventing famines isn't passive, it's active. It requires early warning, the suppression of hoarding and speculation, circulation of money so that poor people can buy grain and don't just get extorted by landlords and most importantly land reform... which the British weren't in a position to do given the size of the country and their hands-off stance. Indian food security still has not been fixed even today, hundreds of millions are stunted due to malnutrition.
What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?
There's a world of difference between 'mid javascript jockey', 'mid accountant', 'mid miscellaneous office worker' and 'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'.
I suspect you don't mean the latter but the former, since you're talking about 'the job pool' rather than 'high powered R&D positions'.
If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right? Canada and Australia have been much more aggressive in mass migration than the US. They're fairly free market anglo-derived liberal democracies, the closest analogues to the US. Australia has a points system supposedly targeting skills shortages and 'high skill migrants'. Both Australia and Canada have had a terrible time in terms of prosperity and economic growth, despite (because of) all this immigration. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for about a decade. In truth it's not high-skill immigrant workers that are coming in, many of them just do food delivery. There are a small fraction of actually-high-skill workers and a huge number of people gaming the system to work or gain access to a richer country than their birthplace, which is understandable but not necessarily in the national interest.
The US gets most of the best anyway, since why would anyone really talented think 'I want to move to Australia and start a company there.' Tiny market size, limited capital, great distance from the rest of the world, barren manufacturing sector, high energy prices...
If you're gonna have immigration, better 'high skill migrants' than refugees from shithole countries. But better still to just skim the very best, the actually high skill migrants. If a company wants to bring someone in, charge them 200K as a flat fee to ensure they're really getting their money's worth, that they absolutely need this person. If a university wants to bring someone in, make sure they'd be in the top 5% of domestic students, were they a domestic. The US could cut immigration 98% and do just fine.
See also: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/brain-drain-as-geopolitical-strategy
jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth
Do we then need jobs programs for the civilizationally impaired, those peoples who couldn't make a rich, safe country themselves? This line of reasoning cuts both ways. If Americans are so lazy, inept and stupid, shouldn't these talented and deserving foreigners stay at home rather than come to babysit these lowlife Americans who don't know how to do anything? Americans invented Javascript, one imagines they can find some mid Javascript developers at home.
The British were not kind to India.
They were incredibly kind to India as an imperial overlord.
They actually paid money to the Raj government when deploying Indian troops for imperial operations that didn't have to do with the defence of India. The cost of war would be borne by the British treasury, not the Indian treasury. India also got access to British technology and investment. When WW2 ended, India had twice the rail network of China.
In some respects India got a better deal than the US gives its allies today. Britain and Australia don't get rebates for joining in US wars in the Middle East, they get sneered at for not spending enough of their own money on 'defence'.
Who prevented Russia from gobbling up India in their southward push through Central Asia in the 19th century? Who protected India from the Japanese (world-class experts in the field of imperial cruelty)? The British, despite huge 'Quit India' protests. The Bengal Famine was mainly due to the Japanese invasion of Burma. Unsurprisingly, if rice imports from Burma are cut off and millions of refugees flee North, during a time of wartime strain, there will be problems in Bengal. Wherever the Japanese went, there was famine. Famine in the Philippines, famine in Indonesia, famine in China and famine in East India.
And we see the same incredible overgenerosity today where Indians/ex-Raj ethnicities get all kinds of special privileges in the UK - jobs that are safeguarded for non-whites, police refusing to crack down on them despite unmentionable abuses lest they seem racist. Then there's all the foreign aid they gave India post-independence.
India just finds it easier to blame Britain for everything that goes wrong, all the poverty that remains. It also helps unite the country, there's nothing so universally popular as hating and blaming outsiders. The British and Europeans generally did far more harm to China with the Opium Wars and unequal treaties (let alone the Japanese) yet China has come out well ahead of India today.
If the British were half as cruel as the Indian media likes to suggest, India would be a servile, loyal colony today. They could've liquidated Gandhi on the spot or prevented any Indian intellectual class emerging in the first place. They could've crushed any revolt with heavy-handed suppression, machine-gun fire, gas and incendiary attacks. Just imagine the amount of devastation they inflicted on rich, industrialized Germany, all the millions of men they put into the field instead redirected instead to repress India. Success would be assured. They could've used Indians as cheap labour in factories, instead they let them start their own trade unions. Britain even let Indians become the commercial class of East Africa, enjoying the fruits of empire as a subject.
Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
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