Shrike
5hr ago
Have you done any research on this yourself? Are you familiar with, e.g., the very low cost of nuclear energy in South Korea?
I'm pro-nuclear, but I don't exactly have an essay written up on as to why – it's an aggregation of various things I've read over the years. But if you do a quick Google you'll find sources like this one (I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it and I think it covers the points you are interested in).
Obviously, if nuclear isn't financially acceptable in cost, I am interested in hearing about it. But my priors, based on osmosis, is that that cost is at least partially artificially inflated, and that there are a lot of hidden environmental costs to "clean" energy methods like solar.
One of the things the article I linked notes to is that wind and solar (which take up tremendous amounts of space) are heavily subsidized, whereas nuclear energy (at least in the US) is burdened by overregulation. In South Korea, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar.
Check out the article I linked, maybe do some research yourself, and report back :)
Shrike
1d ago
Fortunately we have invented video games which are infinitely superior to prostitution!
Glib answers aside, and conceding your point for the sake of argument - it seems to me that we would want to balance what you are saying against the demonstrated positive good of the monogamous model. Which I think suggests that having prostitution "normalized" is not the ideal. Again, agreeing with you for the sake of argument (I'm not sure that I do "for real" but I acknowledge that this argument is facially plausible and worth engaging with) it seems that the goal would be to have prostitution available enough to reduce violent crime, but suppressed or stigmatized enough to drive most people towards the nuclear family.
Which I think is historically a not unusual state of, ah, affairs.
Shrike
1d ago
I don't think "looking down on guys who can't get a mate" is a new thing, or something we've developed recently in the West.
Prostitution has been varying degrees of frowned on/illegal in the West since Christianity took hold (and even absent Christianity, I think it's fairly rare that prostitution is considered an esteemed career, historically). It's not like everything was fine up until George W. Bush banned prostitution, or whatever. Historically there have always been cycles where it was tolerated and then cracked down on.
It's true that literal "mail order brides" are looked down on, but people still go overseas (or online) and find someone who meets their fancy and marry them, and that's not illegal and I don't think is generally looked down on at all, as long as it isn't framed as a transactional relationship.
Setting all the moral quibblings aside, the nuclear family is a very beneficial societal force, and prostitution a negative one, so it doesn't seem strange that people would promote the one thing and look down on the other.
Shrike
2d ago
The smart take is that the Constitution can't really be forked because under the current arrangement the Supreme Court gets to decide what the interpretation is.
The galaxy-brained take is that the Constitution is constantly being forked due to circuit splits!
Shrike
2d ago
Trump and Biden as dueling time-travelers sent back by rival political factions who occasionally slip up and say things from the world as they experienced it?
Shrike
3d ago
Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.
Is this (historically) true or conjecture?
On the topic of rank speculation, it might be worth pointing out with regards to your analysis of wealth and limited class mobility that firstborns in particularly are supposedly slightly smarter than their younger siblings on average, and under primogeniture rules you would essentially expect successive firstborns to accumulate lots of wealth, which in turn as you mention would allow them to sustain and have more children. I do not know enough about when and where primogeniture is practiced to comment extensively but it was practiced in England during the Middle Ages from what I recall. No idea if the supposed firstborn IQ advantage could be expected to have a genetic component, but since everyone acknowledges that intelligence is partially cultural maybe it's still relevant.
Shrike
8d ago
I feel somewhat similarly. Democracy is not necessarily the only characteristic I think is valauble in a nation, but I would prefer Taiwan govern itself, for different interrelated reasons.
(Also a lot of people would die. But even if it was a bloodless coup, I would prefer that the values of the Chinese Communist Party not be ascendent.)
I think that legal fictions are important! If "everybody knows they're separate even if there's a legal fiction otherwise" in your personal life, you're still legally bound to your spouse until divorce proceedings are finalized.
The United States arguably should not have recognized the Chinese Communist government specifically for this reason.
Either "lol international law and treaties aren't real," in which case maybe things like Iraq and Afghanistan (or Ukraine or an invasion of Taiwan) were bad but they arguably weren't illegal, or any aggressive military force that a nation, including the United States, takes that is not in self-defense or approved by the UN Security Council are a violation of its obligations under both the UN Charter and, if the country happens to be a NATO member, Article 1 of the NATO charter, where all parties agree "to refrain in [its] international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."
Now, someone is going to arrive and explain to me that there is some argument made somewhere that international law allows one to contravene what seems to be the absolutely kinda clear language of the UN and NATO charters. To which I say: it sounds like legal fictions are important. (But to which I also say: if you can launch an offensive military operation without UN approval and the UN General Assembly condemns it as a violation of international law but the UN Security Council never does anything about it because the member launching the operation sits on the Council, then maybe "lol international law and treaties aren't real.")
I happen to think that international law and custom is good and that it was arguably an absolutely massive mistake to tie any of that to a body as dysfunctional as the United Nations. But nobody forced us to sign the UN Charter or the NATO Charter.
Shrike
11d ago
They definitely were in Ukraine, but I think, from my limited poking around, that it might be an overstatement to say they were under Ukrainian control. From what I understand, parts of the Russian and Ukrainian military didn't disaggregate until at least 1997 (when the Black Sea Fleet was split), and Ukraine agreed in 1991 that the nuclear weapons would be controlled from Moscow under the auspices of the CIS. Furthermore, the troops that physically controlled the Ukrainian nuclear weapons were...not necessarily loyal to Ukraine:
In Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the rocket armies, missile divisions and bomber commands were led by Russian generals, operated and maintained by Russian officers and men. They were controlled from higher headquarters in the Russian capital for their personnel, funding, communications, nuclear safety standards, security systems, even their operational targets. Their professional loyalty was to Russia, but their armies and commands were located in another nation’s territory. Consequently, the commanders of the air divisions and rocket armies stationed in Kazakhstan and Belarus faced conflicting pressures, just like Colonel General Mikhtyuk and general officers in the 43rd Rocket Army in Ukraine.
According to the DTRA report, Mikhytuk and most of his men refused to take an oath of loyalty to Ukraine in 1992.
The above is from a 2014 Defense Threat Reduction Agency report ("With Courage and Persistence") about US disarmament programs. It's also something I found by reading the Wikipedia page on the Budapest Memorandum – so this isn't something I know a lot about, and I'm certainly open to counter-points on the matter. This is all somewhat new to me – I had kinda thought the weapons were stranded in Ukraine with Russia holding onto the PAL codes until I noticed that Wikipedia insisted the weapons were never under Ukrainian operational control.
Agree on the ease of building atomic weapons.
Shrike
11d ago
I think you are confusing me with another poster. I am not the poster you replied to.
Shrike
11d ago
The South is a prime example of this (analogizing their situation to the Revolutionary War, which proved to be misleading) but you're going to have to fill me in or at least jog my memory on what happened in 1870.
Shrike
11d ago
That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.
The war I am most familiar with is probably the American Civil War, which was at least in part a force-generation contest. The Union followed a similarly stupid pattern of force generation – unlike the South, which backfilled depleted units with fresh troops, the Union raised entire new fresh inexperienced companies and sent them into battle. You speak with a level of sophistication about such things that indicates to me that I do not need to explain why this is a terrible idea.
Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake, based on anything I've read, to presume the U.S. Army was less competent or equally competent in 1864 compared to 1860. In fact, my impression is that they were considerably improved by the end of the war.
This doesn't get into the other elements you mention (EW, drone, missiles) where testing their technology against frontline NATO assets is only going to enhance their capabilities.
Now, it's possible that experiences from the American Civil War don't cross-apply here, and that I'm the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. But I suspect they hold at least partially.
Shrike
11d ago
Yes, that's exactly the one I meant to cite. My point was not that IRA stuff was successful – my understanding was that it was very limited in reach, and so unlikely to be effective or to do anything like "swing an election." (IIRC, there was other research done on Facebook that backs up that same point.) My point is that there are actually good ways to quantify that, we don't have to throw up our hands and say "well we can't know if propaganda works" – we can actually measure it.
Shrike
11d ago
I would add a few things –
First, I don't disagree re: the effects of unrestricted submarine warfare. In fact, I would add that the United States has a (reasonable, imho) history of getting involved in naval warfare due to seizure of its maritime assets and to preserve free trade, so it is possible that they would have been drawn in even if Germany did not adopt unrestricted submarine warfare.
But it's also fair to say that Germany was painted as a villain in English propaganda (and Germany did commit some fairly horrific war crimes during the war, so arguably they earned it). But certainly the casting of Germans as "the Hun" speaks to an effort to psy-op Americans into the war, even if the United States would have entered anyway. (It's also worth noting that American public opinion swung strongly against entry into the war, pushing Democrats at the polls and swinging to large majorities of anti-war sentiment in the intervening years. In fact it's not clear to me that a majority of Americans actually supported entering the war when war was declared – I don't know about that one way or the other).
To me that at least superficially pattern-matches the "psyop everyone into war" pattern, but I'm seeing that you, me, and functor may all have a slightly different theory as to what is meant by that. To be clear, though, I do agree you have a point about the importance of unrestricted submarine warfare, which was not something dreamed up by British propaganda.
Secondly, what's interesting is that while things like the English blockade you mention didn't prevent the US from entering the war against Germany, Wilson did try to resist characterizing the United States as allied with England and France, preferring to frame it as being coincidentally on the same side (and of course all the war-to-end-all-wars League of Nations stuff).
Thirdly, you (and I, earlier) skipped the funniest best part of the Zimmerman note! The Germans sent it to Mexico using American undersea cables, because the British had cut theirs and the US had extended use of their cables as a diplomatic courtesy. The British could hardly acknowledge that they had tapped the American diplomatic telegraph cables, so after intercepting the message they had to run a covert operation to steal a copy from its destination in Mexico so they could present it to the United States. Absolute Get Smart stuff, I love it.
Shrike
11d ago
The ability to distinguish which is which is what I am contesting. The ability to say normal is good and artificial is bad is the easy part of differentiation- the issue is actually being able to say what is 'normal' versus 'artificial.'
I grant that it's fuzzy in some places. I think it is bad when it is lying, and artificial when it is foreign. I don't think there's no difference between things that are true and things that are lies.
Answer - by reading the internal documentation of propaganda agencies citing western media coverage of them as proof that they are effective when justifying their budgets to paymasters.
Uh...that's not the only way to do it. Example of a different approach (I've just read the abstract, fwiw).
Shrike
11d ago
I agree about drones.
I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)
I would add to this – personally – mines, mines mines. Not as big a revolution as drones, obviously, but it seems fairly likely to me, in hindsight, that NATO planners were unprepared for the volume of mines the Russians were prepared to field.
Shrike
11d ago
I think you can make a legible distinction between foreign psy-ops (organized campaigns conducted at the behest of foreign powers) and organic domestic consensus in principle – in other words, there is a difference between the two – which is all that I meant. You can condemn the one and think that the other is all right. I agree that you can't necessarily turn back time and rerun history without the impact of a psy-op to see what effect it might have, and I further agree that psyops run in different directions, making the measurement of impact difficult. But that does not mean that a psy-op has zero effect, or an inestimable effect. (If this was true, it would arguably follow that there was no measurable or real harm in believing psyops or allowing your policy to be shaped by them, and I don't think that's correct.)
When things are hard to measure- and few things are as hard to measure as the actual effects any amount of propaganda has- it's an easy rationalization to attribute unwanted decisions to the malign influence of outsiders while your favored directions are obviously enlightened objectivity of reasonable people.
I'm not sure that it's necessarily true that you cannot measure the impact of propaganda. In fact I'm fairly confident that it isn't true today – maybe it was in 1921. But today you can actually quantify things like the impact the Internet Research Agency had on the 2020 election, not perfectly, but enough to get a measurement on it and talk about the impact it has.
But even if you grant that it is, it doesn't follow that it is good to run propaganda campaigns (and I would say especially ones that involve untruths, especially on your own people) or that it is bad for domestic governments to resist the influence of foreign government propaganda.
For instance, to talk about something I think it even more clear-cut than the psyops surrounding the world wars, I think the Nayirah testimony was
- Literally false (the person giving testimony reported firsthand knowledge she did not have)
- Substantively false (later investigation strongly suggests that not only were the specifics false, but the type of event depicted – Iraqis looting incubators, leading to children's deaths – never happened)
- Substantially justified the decision of the US to enter the Gulf War (was publicly referred to by decision-makers)
And I think this was an effort to propagandize Americans into involvement that was illegitimate (from the American point of view – obviously a Kuwaiti may have a different perspective) precisely because it was based on lies. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that the effectiveness of things like the Nayirah testimony generates callousness and suspicion towards actual atrocities.
Shrike
11d ago
This is a good comment, I really appreciate the specific technical description coupled with the cultural insight.
Shrike
11d ago
During the American Civil War, there were a number of European military observers who came, looked around, looked at the horrific loss of bloodshed and things like elaborate trench fortifications, and came to a conclusion: the Yanks didn't know how to fight. They went home satisfied with themselves and unprepared for 1914 because they did not realize they were witnessing a revolution in military affairs, as the lethality of fires increased without a corresponding revolution in maneuver.
A lot of Ukrainians and Russians are dying and since where I am we get the privilege of sitting this round out, I really, really hope that we're able to take away something from it besides "Russia's military sucks" this time.
Shrike
11d ago
Correct. The Taliban were actually something like radical modernizers (compared to the status quo in Afghanistan) who wanted to replace old tribal customs with sharia law.
Shrike
11d ago
I think one can draw a legible distinction between a foreign government running an espionage operation coupled with an untruthful propaganda campaign and the normal process of domestic consensus-making, but I take your point. Particularly in This Day And Age (anything after the telegraph) you've got to presume the possibility of hostile psyops in all directions.
Shrike
11d ago
Yeah, a podcast is 100% the place to be doing PR aimed at the people who are going to listen to it (probably not Putin), it's definitely not the place to make concessions or to commit other own-goals (not speaking Russian seemed obvious to me, although I haven't listened to the podcast.)
Shrike
11d ago
Do you know anything about American reluctance to enter the World Wars?
Obviously they don't follow the pattern he lays out here (Americans didn't lose those wars) but doesn't American reluctance to enter those wars support the "psy-opping people to get them to go to war" theory? This seems particularly true in WW1 where England (in addition to stirring up a lot of anti-German propaganda) passed the Zimmerman Note (which was authentic) to the US to get them to join the war in such a way as to conceal the fact that they obtained it by tapping American diplomatic lines as part of a concerted strategy to draw the United States into the war. Wilson was reelected on his track record of not getting involved and then...
There was a similar effort by the Brits in WW2 but I can't remember any of the really striking narratives from it.
I'm not opposed to solar, but it takes up considerably more space than an equivalent nuclear plant, and is worse for the environment.
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