RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
You can buy anything with Bitcoin, an early use-case was illegal drugs. They physically cannot stop you making the transaction. In this scenario they'd probably watch all the BTC addresses, so you'd actually be using monero or some other privacy-coin.
Anyway, no revolution can work without financing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Isn't that just glitching?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
The Israelis had a pretty cordial relationship with ISIS, see https://www.newsweek.com/israeli-defense-minister-i-prefer-isis-iran-our-borders-417726
The love-in was reciprocated, I don't recall any ISIS attacks against Israel.
They want anyone but Assad and thus Iran. And they mean anyone. Assad also wanted the Golan Heights back, as would most strong Syrian governments regardless of who is in charge. So a weak and divided Syria is what Israel wants to see.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
At this rate we're going to be living under a tyranny that fails to protect us from living under a tyrant.
But look back over US history. You guys stomped the Native Americans, conquered much of Mexico, ripped various colonies off Spain because you could, mandated that an entire hemisphere was yours alone to dominate. You took steps to crush Germany and Japan before they could even potentially threaten you (defanging Britain and France along the way). You then fought a fifty-year campaign to contain and eventually eliminate the Soviet Union. That ignores all the little wars, going in on Panama and Grenada, all the regime changes around the world, Operation Gladio, Iraq of all places...
The history of the last two hundred years is dominated by the US destroying real or imagined threats, wherever they are. Why stop when you face by far the biggest threat? For the first time in US history, you're up against someone as big, or even bigger than you guys. There won't be any allies that can do much of the heavy lifting this time, it's down to you. This is the final boss and it requires full commitment.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I get it, you just want to grill.
But what happens if the local steakhouse starts being rationed? Maybe they haven't met their Climate Obligations? Or maybe you aren't doing your part of the Green New Deal? You might want to go to a market... oh your digital good boy points can't be traded to Non-Licensed Traders?
How are you going to protest if you can't fund anything individually or collectively? How can you have free speech if you can't pay for a journal or web hosting? The next thing you know the police have invited you over to 'have tea' like they do in China and there's nothing you can do about it, certainly not paying for a lawyer.
Without freedom of transaction, there are no other freedoms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
We can avoid worldwide CBDC tyranny if we establish a convention that currencies (and especially digital currencies) are more than just bits of paper arbitrarily created and destroyed by politicians and their banker buddies. Better to have Doge, Shiba and even HarryPotterObamaSonic10inu than to own nothing but digital good boy points.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
The Mongols desired world domination and a good chunk of their genepool is in China today.
And power is seductive. One could easily say 'America doesn't want world domination they just want to stay in isolation on their continent' back in the 19th century. But they had the power, they had global interests by virtue of their size, they got sucked in and began to enjoy wielding their strength.
The Chinese are the same. When East Asia was all they knew, they worked hard to dominate it. China today has global interests in market access, resources, ideological legitimacy. They buy Iranian and Russian oil, they're building ports in Argentina, they refine nickel in Indonesia, Chinese companies fight drug wars against Mexican gangs for distribution rights in US cities: https://x.com/SantsPliego/status/1748496050543837404
They are so big that they end up doing almost everything, almost everywhere. Every day there will be some dispute over fishing rights, some struggle with local interests, some crisis that needs a response. There is a voice shrieking 'use power' in the ear of their leaders every single day, from events and from their subordinates (who were raised in the atmosphere of intense nationalism they used to replace Maoism). It would require leaders of superhuman passivity and benevolence to resist the urge to start wielding their economic and military power forever.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
If they truly felt guilty, then wouldn't they stop beating up Armenia? They've continued doing it to this day, they were helping Azerbaijan against Armenia in the recent war.
Turkey (as a collective) doesn't feel guilty any more than the serial armed burglar feels guilty for his victims who he thrashes and loots. The armed burglar might say (if dragged into court or questioned by some third party) that of course he feels guilty and ashamed and it was society's fault and he was underage at the time and his friends made him do it and they had it coming anyway... But there is no sincerity in his words. He might be sad that he got caught or that his actions have consequences, he doesn't really feel guilty or want to make amends.
If you think Turkey feels guilt, then do you also think the burglar feels guilt?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
What is an even footing?
China plays all kinds of games with its currency, industrial policy and so on. They have cards to play due to their privileged position in terms of size and talent pool. Since Deng Xiaoping they play the hand that they're dealt pretty well - not without mistakes of course but pretty well.
Western countries also have cards to play, we also have tariffs, industrial policy, currency manipulation and a privileged position in terms of a pre-built capital base and advanced technology. China was spending 1% of GDP on their military for many years as they focused purely on building up economically, that would've been a great time to impose military pressure.
If we don't play our cards, how can we expect to win? If we play our cards too late, how can we expect to win? Do we want to face weak enemies or strong enemies? Do we expect our enemies to show us the same level of mercy that we show them, if they have the upper hand?
Let's not forget that China has been a ruthless one-party state the entire time. The reformists got crushed in '89. They had a Taiwan Straits Crisis in the mid 90s. It really takes a world-historically stupid elite class to stay deluded about Chinese ambitions until the mid-2010s.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
I fully agree but we need to first fix the leadership problem before getting into the specifics of damage control.
Why is China now the world capital of industry? Because we let them build up earlier as opposed to hammering them back when they were weak. It would've been so much easier to constrain their semiconductor industry 20 years ago. It would've been so much easier to stop them moving into the South China Sea before they put down all these airbases and artificial islands. It would've been so much easier to choke off their strategic industries when ours were bigger. It would've been so much easier to maintain military superiority if we weren't fighting stupid, expensive and pointless wars in MENA.
The US actually sabotaged and suppressed Taiwan's nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. Twice! Now it's far too late to put nukes there, the Chinese would go in before they could be set up.
Our strategy has been to appease China when they were weak and harass them now that they're strong. This is not wise.
Why has all this happened? The people at the helm have been arrogant fools. Biden laughed at the notion of a Russo-Sino-Iranian compact back in 1997, when there were so many ways we could've headed this off with lower costs and risks: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788
Bill Clinton went 'oh the Chinese are trying to censor the internet, that's like nailing Jell-O to the wall!'. He was wrong. Censoring the internet is easy and desirable for any state, as we now understand.
Unless we get rid of all the arrogant fools from high office, there's no chance of success. They'll hector India for being too fascist, they'll open up yet another Middle East sideshow, they'll constantly cancel every naval procurement program so that billions are spent and no capabilities produced, they'll let in all these Chinese nationals to leading AI companies (and the military), they'll squander wealth on green technology, they'll DEI meritocracy away. They will find ways to blunder that we can't even imagine!
Even today people are going on TV saying '400% tarriffs! Let's bring Beijing to its knees': https://www.newsweek.com/kevin-oleary-donald-trump-tariffs-china-defcon-1-1992284
People like this are so stupid, it's laughable. That's not how tarriffs work and it misjudges the balance of economic power. But they are running the show, the lesson still hasn't been learnt.
Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection.
I see this talking point a lot and it always irritates me. Britain has 200 H-bombs. France has about 200 H-bombs. The European half of NATO has about 1.5 million professional soldiers, several carrier squadrons, huge numbers of tanks, aircraft and submarines... They have BAE, Rheinmetall, Eurofighters. They have 450 million people! It does not matter whether they spend 2% of GDP or 3% or 1%, what matters is the actual balance of capabilities.
How does Russia threaten Europe? This isn't 1978. Russian conventional forces are outmatched and pure demography is massively against them. There's no way 140 million people conquer 450 million when tech and wealth leans vaguely towards the latter.
The only thing the Russians have that Europe does not is a much larger nuclear arsenal and large-scale munitions production. The notion that Europe is somehow leeching off the US makes zero sense. They already have broad conventional superiority. Even with higher munitions output Russia is not capable of rushing through to Warsaw, let alone Berlin and wouldn't take such risks anyway. Why would they get into a war with several nuclear powers?
The US is actually a major threat to Europe, causing retarded wars in the Middle East with damaging flow-on effects into Europe. Or their rather successful gambit to split Russia from Europe. No more cheap energy from Russia, get excited about expensive energy from America! Of course the Europeans bear much of the blame for passively sitting back and letting the US protect them from competitive energy prices and homogenous, high-trust society. Nevertheless, the US is ultimately at fault.
The US's real dependants are in the Pacific - Australia, Japan, South Korea. They actually face an industrially, demographically, militarily potent foe in China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Christian guilt in the world circa 1700
It wasn't fully expressed back then, people had ways to rationalize it 'oh these natives are savages we can do as we please' or similar. Or 'we're colonizing them for their own good' - which was often true, or at least they thought they were doing that at times. Spreading Christianity was a major part of the colonial mission, from day 1.
Back in the 1600s, back at the beginning of the colonial story in North America the native Americans managed to get several devastating sneak-attack raids off on the English because the latter stupidly decided to be friends:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre_of_1622
They did the same thing again in 1644 and managed to kill another few hundred people! It took enormous amounts of experience before whites worked out that they weren't friends with the native americans, that their interests were opposed. And this was quickly unlearnt after the latter were thoroughly beaten, now there are land acknowledgements and so on.
Something else has changed the cost/benefit analysis.
There's no cost-benefit analysis that says men gain by giving women much more power in society (thereby losing power themselves). It can only be a moral, justice-based approach.
Wikipedia:
Turkey's official denial of the Armenian genocide continues to rely on the CUP's justification of its actions. The Turkish government maintains that the mass deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action to combat an existential threat to the empire, but that there was no intention to exterminate the Armenian people
That's basically 'it never happened and it was good that it did'.
I'm surprised that the Turkish foreign ministry can't string together an English sentence but this does seem like an official website: https://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-armenian-allegation-of-genocide-the-issue-and-the-facts.en.mfa
FACT 1: Demographic studies prove that prior to World War I, fewer than 1.5 million Armenians lived in the entire Ottoman Empire. Thus, allegations that more than 1.5 million Armenians from eastern Anatolia died must be false.
FACT 2: Armenian losses were few in comparison to the over 2.5 million Muslim dead from the same period.
FACT 3: Certain oft-cited Armenian evidence is of diminished value, having been derived from dubious and prejudicial sources.
FACT 4: The Armenian deaths do not constitute genocide.
FACT 5: The British convened the Malta Tribunals to try Ottoman officials for crimes against Armenians. All of the accused were acquitted.
FACT 6: Despite the verdicts of the Malta Tribunals, Armenian terrorists have engaged in a vigilante war that continues today.
FACT 7: The archives of many nations ought to be carefully and thoughtfully examined before concluding whether genocide occurred.
They're just playing games, if you try hard enough you can produce mountains of proof in favour of the most ridiculous nonsense. As long as big players care about right and wrong, countries will produce all kinds of arguments for why they're in the right. And everyone does this stuff for propaganda reasons anyway.
Furthermore, unlike with the Holocaust, Turkey isn't going to apologize. They won't pay reparations. They won't write it in their textbooks that this was a terrible shame on their civilization - they say that patriotic Turks need to be vigilant against all national security threats. There is no 'never again'. Only whites do this. The substantive differences are more important than the rhetorical differences. Talk is cheap, actions are costly. And it's only white countries that take costly actions to uphold concepts of guilt and moral virtue - consider the British anti-slavery work amongst other things. Nobody else would even consider 'giving back' the Elgin Marbles.
I'm not saying that all genocides and atrocities are committed by non-whites, it's that only whites show any significant guilt or shame.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
I just want to add that being President of South Korea is a poisoned chalice. Nearly all of them got couped, assassinated or arrested after they leave office.
Maybe this very silly coup-farce is still rational? From the outside view, Yoon must've known that the end was closing in, so may as well try rolling the dice.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.
Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.
By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.
Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.
Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.
Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.
Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
There has been a significant decline in students’ academic performance because of pandemic-era school closure policies. Standardized test scores show that children lost decades worth of academic progress.The performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading declined to levels recorded two decades ago, and the average composite score for the ACT by high school graduates dropped below 20 for the first time since The students whose classes were less disrupted in the 2020-2021 school year lost about 20 percent of math learning compared to losses of 50 percent for students who did not have access to in-person instruction.
According to Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, pandemic-era students could lose an estimated $70,000 in lifetime income.These losses are estimated to be two to nine percent of lifetime earnings, depending on the state they live and the severity of school closures.
Does this make sense? I had the misfortune to do some university during the pandemic, I can confirm that very little was learnt. Zoom is not conducive to paying attention, there was a perfect storm of technical problems, bad mics, and alt-tab is seductive. My teacher friends tell me there was a noticeable quality decline in this period, from an already low baseline. So the story they're telling is quite reasonable. The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.
But do children learn anything in school anyway? You can graduate from high school and then get a degree without knowing much of anything. I don't know if I learnt that much from the unaffected parts of my degree, as compared to reading a few books or doing my own independent research or working. Newton got a lot of great work done during his pandemic lockdown period.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Who put Two-face in charge of the criminal justice system - let's kill everyone who commits a serious crime.
I don't want the lucky 35/36 of the El Salvedoran 'Drug, Murder and Satanism 5000' gang back on the street.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
According to HRW the problem is due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons (often poorly designed older ones) and a lack of consequences. De facto, lawyers don't want to prosecute prisoners or prisons, they don't feel like there's any good payoff there (especially if they're basically telling prisons they don't know what they're doing). They want to have a cordial relationship with prisons apparently.
Prison guards basically outsource social control to prisoners because they're lazy and don't care. They'll line up 20 people in front of the victim and go 'alright which one was it' - marking the victim as a snitch who recieves worse treatment. It's indirect corporal punishment, like anarcho-tyranny but for prisons (maximum anarchy and maximum tryanny). If they don't like you, they can see to it that Wayne Robertson is your cellmate.
In the worst cases, prisoners are actually placed in the same cell with inmates who are likely to victimize them--sometimes even with inmates who have a demonstrated proclivity for sexually abusing others. The case of Eddie Dillard, a California prisoner who served time at Corcoran State Prison in 1993, is an especially chilling example of this problem. Dillard, a young first-timer who had kicked a female correctional officer, was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, a prisoner known by all as the "Booty Bandit."(412) The skinny Dillard was no match for Robertson, a huge, muscular man serving a life sentence for murder. Not only was Robertson nearly twice Dillard's weight, but he had earned his nickname through his habit of violently raping other prisoners.
Before the end of the day, the inevitable occurred: Robertson beat Dillard into submission and sodomized him. For the next two days, Dillard was raped repeatedly, until finally his cell door was opened and he ran out, refusing to return. A correctional officer who worked on the unit later told the Los Angeles Times: "Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he's raped inmates since."(413) Indeed, according to documents submitted at a California legislative hearing on abuses at Corcoran, Robertson had committed more than a dozen rapes inside Corcoran and other prisons.(414) By placing Dillard in a cell with Robertson, the guards were setting him up for punishment.
Whether as a purposeful act or through mere negligence prisoners are all too often placed together with cellmates who rape them. A Connecticut prisoner told Human Rights Watch how he too was raped by a cellmate with a history of perpetrating rape:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
"I want to reduce the prison population."
"Great! The Innocence Project is looking for new advo..."
"That's not quite what I meant..."
According to wikipedia (though others dispute this), the US is the only country on Earth where there's more male-on-male rape than male-on-female, there have been some legal changes but no significant practical improvements since 2001.
It's ridiculous that people who commit the worst crimes are practically untouchable since their sentence can hardly get longer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
It's like this in prison too. I read extracts from this shocking report about what goes on in US prisons. If it were down to me, this alone would get America expelled from the first world, though considering Rotherham and similar the ranks of the civilized countries would dwindle very quickly:
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Joe Schmo gets into prison for some DUI offence. Unfortunately he has a slightly feminine looking appearance and isn't that big. His attitude isn't sufficiently manly, maybe he's not streetsmart, maybe he's too intellectual, maybe he's white...
Punishment for his crime? Vicious anal rape and forced prostitution, HIV infection too.
Wayne "Booty Bandit" Robertson is in prison for murder - life sentence. But he is big and very strong.
Punishment for his crime? Sex on demand with his cellmate and exciting opportunities in the slave-trading business.
This is the reverse of justice. It would be far more humane and civilized to blow Wayne's head off with an autocannon and let Joe serve his sentence in peace. Wayne is a bad hombre and should be liquidated in a spectacular and intimidating way, to demonstrate that we are not in the stone-age anymore, there are more important things than muscle mass and naked aggression.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Haiti is a small shithole country that, last I checked, was controlled by a cannibal who barbecued people. They're so incompetent and disorganized that the Presidential Palace still hasn't been repaired after an earthquake struck in 2010.
The US is a huge, highly developed country with aspirations to world hegemony. They produce plenty of advanced technology. Why can't they find the physical or human capital to build ships efficiently? How hard can it be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports
The Italians can do it. The Germans can do it. The Finns can do it! White people spent about 500 years clobbering the rest of the world because we had better ships, the US relies on its navy for relevance in world affairs. This planet is 75% water. Shipbuilding is not something that can be sacrificed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
The US had a healthy shipbuilding industry in 1940, such that it could produce the biggest fleet in the world, fight and win huge wars against rival great powers on the other side of the world. 20 years of Jones Act protection didn't do much harm. I think the Jones Act is a symptom, not a cause. High US wages were already making it difficult to man a large US merchant marine back in the 1920s, hence protection. The problem is not enough protection, not smart enough protection, insufficient and inefficient subsidies, insufficient automation.
Why don't companies move into shipbuilding on the basis that there's huge latent demand? Is a wholly protected US domestic market seriously too small to support shipbuilding? The US has the second longest coastline in the world, a bunch of islands and hundreds of millions of consumers! Does the US lack the capital to build shipyards? Is there a shortage of skilled labour? Is there some huge thicket of laws preventing efficient shipbuilding? Unions? Some combination of these?
I doubt the root causes of the problem will be resolved by killing the Jones Act. All that will happen is political backlash from massive job losses and a modest increase to economic efficiency. But without protection, there is no chance of competing against North East Asia (who have the capital, economies of scale, labour and best practices already established). Without protection, there is no chance of ever revitalizing US shipping since there will be nothing to revitalize.
Shooting the patient in the head does reduce medical costs but it's not really a cure.
I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.
It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.
How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.
National resources aren't the most important thing but they're certainly important. It doesn't hurt that Saudi Arabia has a gazillion barrels of crude. Back in the 1930s they were almost totally irrelevant, oil put them on the map. Nor is the US disadvantaged by having enormous reserves of oil, coal, iron and fertile soil.
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