Shrike
19d ago
I think the idea that UAP are necessarily connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms is wrong. We could have a ship full of dead bodies in a hangar at Area 51 and still have no proof of extraterrestrial life. Likewise, if we detect a megastructure around a nearby star that's the product of alien life, it doesn't prove anything about UAP.
Shrike
19d ago
One of the most enduring constants in UFOlogy is that people who go down the UFO rabbit hole often find that it stares back (yeah yeah it's a horrible mixed metaphor.) I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.
UFOs are very interesting because the intelligence agencies either have pretty hard proof or they don't, but I find it interesting that there does seem to be such an overlap within the intelligence community between people who are "into" UFOs and people who are "into" stuff like poltergeists. If you had e.g. satellite imagery of a UFO reentering the atmosphere, presumably you wouldn't connect that to woo stuff like remote viewing, but we live in a world with people like Hal Putoff and Lue Elizondo.
Makes you wonder what they know (Grush referred to UFOs as "inter-dimensional," which has been the conjecture of leading UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee – who of course has his own ties to intelligence agencies) – or if they don't know and it's just weird topics attract weird thinkers.
I suspect there's actually something to the weird, but I think it's also important to note that a good intelligence operative is probably very good at making connections between seemingly unrelated things. Seems quite likely that intelligence agencies are brim-full of people who are very good at reading a lot into very small amounts of data, which pays of spectacularly when they're right...and also when they're wrong.
Shrike
23d ago
Am I completely wrong in my guess that the Greens don't want nuclear weapons stationed on German soil?
Shrike
25d ago
I dunno. Some of the international customs, though, for instance around executing people out of uniform, not conducting false surrenders (and respecting noncombatant status of POWs) predates the Geneva Conventions considerably. The Civil War, for instance, is full of screeching about international law – the North threatened to hang Southern privateers as pirates, for instance, under the logic that the Confederacy wasn't a real state. And guerrilla combat was part of the Civil War (and many wars before that).
Even during the Second World War – which was the birth of the modern Conventions – partisans and guerrilla fighters were very commonplace. So while I agree that the world has changed – it might not be the world the Conventions anticipated – a lot of these problems are very old and in fact predate modern international laws.
Shrike
25d ago
Yeah, it seems like the clear implication here is that such forces are supposed to convert themselves into regular armed units in a timely manner. So in the GWOT context, it seems very clear that insurgents operating 5 years into the war, dressing like civilians, hiding their weapons, and not conducting themselves as a "regular armed unit" aren't conducting themselves as expected by the laws of war.
And from the context of Hamas and Hezbollah, it seems to me that (for the reasons you describe) there's no excuse for their forces not to conduct themselves as regular armed units (to whatever extent that they do so) except that it's inexpedient for them, which isn't a justification under the laws of war.
(I should note that I'm not necessarily claiming the Geneva Convention is 100% aligned with morality – there might be instances were guerrilla warfare, like spying, is morally acceptable. But if you're a spy, and you get caught, and executed, you can't very well complain about it – you knew the risks when you signed up. I'm hardly a fan of Hamas or Hezbollah, but my fact claims about the customs of war are just that.)
Shrike
25d ago
Under traditional international law, it's illegal to engage in "classic guerrilla warfare" if by that you mean "not wearing uniforms" or "wearing the uniforms of the enemy," which are both traditional guerrilla war tactics. (The latter was a big sticking point during the US Civil War, as Confederates would sometimes wear captured uniforms.)
I'd need to dig more into how this applies in the Israel/Palestine conflict (especially given Palestine's ambiguous status), but the whole "not wearing uniforms" was something which lots of combatants in the GWOT did. There's a reason that, AFAIK, none of the people who were getting waterboarded were surrendered Iraqi POWs was because the people who were getting waterboarded weren't part of a traditional lawful combatant and thus arguably not protected by the laws of war – my understanding is that that was the logic used by the GWB administration.
I'm not saying waterboarding was the correct decision, but there was a legal reasoning behind the decisions the Bush administration made. They didn't just decide "well we don't have to obey the law because our enemies are evil."
NB, there's provisions in the Geneva Convention, IIRC, for spontaneous resistance to an occupying force.
Shrike
29d ago
The Republicans, for letting MAGA cultists take over the party and drive all serious grown-ups out, and the Democrats, for letting bad faith woke identity politics take over everything.
What exactly were the Dems and GOP supposed to do about this? Candidates are selected ~democratically (I suppose it's fair to criticize the Democrats for just...skipping that step this election cycle); Trump developed a huge base in the GOP; "wokeness" has a decent base in the Democrat party. And many GOP "adults in the room" DID criticize Trump, and got ran out of the party for their troubles.
Let me try to answer my own question:
I think the effort to head off Trump needed to happen in the primaries for the 2016, and it needed to take on the form of some of those 1,492 GOP candidates dropping out earlier to consolidate the anti-Trump base of support, and it needed to take on the form of denouncing the foreign policy misadventures of the Bush-Obama years (which were becoming unpopular, but were still often not criticized in the GOP in 2016.) But it's not the fault of "the Republicans" that this happened; they couldn't force candidates to drop out on the optimal timelines any more than they could force Trump not to throw his hat in the ring.
Heading off wokeness, I think, is easier – Democrat elites could have been criticizing wokeness the same way that Republican elites often criticized Trump. But I think this risked seriously weakening the party. We see, now, that the party is critically divided over Israel/Palestine; attacking "wokeness" 4 or 8 years ago (particularly when it was on the ascent) would have run a similar risk, I think.
I guess my point here is that to the extent that it's the fault of "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" it's really just the fault of "the American people" for voting for them. Maybe this is your point.
I'm certainly interested in the potential upsides of RETVRNing to a time when the people didn't have much of a voice in major party's political choices. But until that happens, "the party" will be very much at the mercy of the voters.
Shrike
1mo ago
Hmm. It seems this is an area of at least some some contention, with some research (e.g. a Mensa survey, which obviously is based on a self-selected sample) suggesting a higher correlation, but most research suggesting IQ is protective.
There's also some evidence suggesting a genetic correlation between autism and high intelligence.
My guess is that (to the degree that IQ is genetic) is that it's probably possible to "overselect" for it to the detriment of other good things (although IIRC we also know that e.g. autism is probably at a minimum correlated with other factors, such as older parents and maternal fever during pregnancy).
Higher IQ leads to better life outcomes which leads to better mental health.
In my personal experience I have observed that the connection between high IQ, good life outcomes, and mental health is not strictly linear. But that's anecdotal and a very small sample size.
Shrike
1mo ago
Isn't intelligence correlated with mental illness?
That seems like a big tradeoff.
Shrike
1mo ago
Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.
Shrike
1mo ago
I think it depends on the specific question we're looking at – for instance, I could see rural/urban being much more predictive than political affiliation for guessing if someone hunts or fishes. But on the other hand, for another example, a lot of benefits are provided by religion, independent of conservatism, so some of what I describe above is differences in religious belief – but it also seems like together they are a very potent combination (for instance religious conservatives are less likely to report they are mentally ill than equally religious liberals; see my third link above.)
But overall, since rural areas are more conservative than urban areas, I think it shakes out to being close to the same if we're just curious about Team Red and Team Blue.
I'm glad you're asking these sorts of questions, though. Personally, I think there's more than two (or three) "tribes" in America, and there's a lot of interesting work to be done untangling them.
For example, Skibboleth could argue (and he might be right, although I suspect, at least by some metrics, that there are many more hunters and fishermen in the United States than insurance salesmen) that a conservative is more likely to be an insurance salesman than a hunter or an angler. But that doesn't stop the hunter-fisher breakdown from skewing red. And while some people are interested only in the degree to which Red Tribe is comprised of hunters and anglers, I think it's interesting to ask what Hunter and Angler Tribe looks like. The United States is a big place, with room for more than two teams.
Shrike
1mo ago
I could just as easily ask where you see that.
Right here, in mainstream polling: a majority of Republicans have a firearm in their household. About 25% of Democrats do. (Independents just below 50/50).
Right here, in mainstream consulting research: Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2:1 among respondents in a poll of hunters and anglers.
Right here, in mainstream social science: conservatives live happier, more fulfilled lives, with fewer divorces, less mental illness.
I think that gross polling averages like this often obscure more interesting dynamics. But there's a reason that conservatives have the "rugged individualism" discourse that Supah mentions - they are more likely to have an inner locus of control.
Shrike
1mo ago
Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.
This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.
Shrike
1mo ago
It seems worth asking if some people already thought democracy in the United States is dying and Trump was just the right man to pin the message on.
Anyway, I understand why people get all het up about him. Put it very simply, I think he says things you "aren't supposed to say" and so him getting elected means the system "doesn't work." ("The system" is supposed to punish people like him.) People get emotional about the thought of sharing a country with people who would vote for him. The fact that people will vote for him suggests that democracy is broken because a sufficient number of people are stupid/evil or there's some sort of election rigging being perpetrated. (This isn't what I think, but I think it's a reasonable-if-reductionistic model).
But also, I don't think it's true that Trump getting elected means nothing happens. For instance, if Trump wins he's going to keep chipping away at the federal judiciary, which is where the left made a lot of their political gains since the Second World War. He's probably going to try to run foreign policy a little bit differently. It seems reasonable to assume that "the economy" will perform better. His cabinet nominees are going to run their departments differently. He's going to veto/not veto laws that might be significant. Whether or not you view that as good or bad is a matter of perspective, I guess. But I don't think it's right to suggest that Trump being in office will be a nothing burger, even if it may also be wrong to suggest that Trump being in office means the end of democracy, the United States, and civilization.
Shrike
1mo ago
At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.
I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.
A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)
But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.
I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.
Shrike
1mo ago
I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)
Shrike
1mo ago
I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.
I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.
I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.
Shrike
1mo ago
In the past, my understanding is that vote-rigging was done by partisan machines in certain jurisdictions. I have the vague intuition that there could be quid-pro-quo deals involved (e.g. the machine agrees to stuff ballots in exchange for getting city contracts, or whatever.)
If I somehow knew that there was industrial-scale voter fraud (say, via a mathematical analysis, or it came to me in a dream) but I wasn't sure exactly how, I would presume something similar was occurring, which would be (part of) why one party wasn't in power constantly - the power of the machine(s) to commit fraud was limited and territorial, and their willingness to do so was contingent on other factors that might not always be in place (e.g. kickbacks, connections, etc.)
I should add that my historical knowledge is sketchy here, and the question of modern fraud isn't something I've really researched or have strong opinions on. It just seems like, based on what I know of how fraud worked in the United States in the past, we should expect it to work differently than top-down ballot-rigging. For instance, last year there was a (judicially recognized) stolen primary election that apparently worked via absentee ballot box stuffing. That's very different than the local political party just counting the votes however they want, which is what I presume happens in at least some "democratic" states abroad (although I'm sure it's possible that bottom-up voter fraud happens in places like e.g. Russia as well/instead of top-down finger-on-the-count type fraud).
Shrike
1mo ago
Prolly worth pointing out that the people involved in the making of a movie gets paid regardless of how well the movie does. If it loses "the studio" money people who are paid up front could care less, financially. Same goes of anyone who isn't fired or docked after going on live TV and telling people not to watch their studio's film.
It is true that in theory this does not account for residuals, however. But I've heard some things indicating that residuals have been gutted relatively recently - if that's true it makes all the more sense that the people actually making the movie would be indifferent to the success of the film (or possibly even actively hostile to it).
Shrike
1mo ago
they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes.
Yep, I 100% agree with this, and am glad someone is doing so.
didn't work out.
Well, admittedly there's some contention on this point.
notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light.
I...am very skeptical of this logic. Imagine if you were the director of the CIA and someone told you you didn't need to worry about Russian spies because all of them that you were aware of had been uncovered eventually!
But anyway, to my point: the government's definitely done far-out research like this. I broadly agree there's not solid evidence they've hit any real "physics-defying" breakthroughs, just that they've looked for them. (However if they found them, I'd obviously expect them to lock it down very tightly.)
Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.
But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.
Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!
Shrike
1mo ago
An extremely funny but prosaic explanation for a lot of this stuff is that the government just keeps lying about aliens to conceal their totally mundane projects and occasionally people within the government get fooled and the story gets out of hand and it's embarrassing to admit how much you lied/got fooled, so...
An even funnier and scarier version of this is that this and the "aliens are real and can hurt you" theories are true and the people who know about the aliens actually prefer alien stories to circulate anyway since it's helpful for people to peel back the layer and find that the "real" story is that the aliens are just a cover for the next stealth bomber or whatever.
Shrike
1mo ago
We know about all their high-tech research projects
Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)
Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Irish descent) doesn't just have a patrician-sounding first name and middle initial, he's a member of an old patrician family (the Mellons), and he's one of the main drivers on the UAP topic. John Ratcliffe (former Director of National Intelligence, English extraction I guess?), John Brennan (former Director of the CIA, Irish descent), H.R. McMaster (former National Security Advisor, Scottish extraction I presume), Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence, Jewish on her mother's side), Mark A. Milley (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Irish), Timothy Gallaudet (Rear Admiral US Navy, French extraction I guess?), and Harald Malmgren (senior aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Nordic) have all publicly indicated that they take the UAP issue seriously, although some of them, like Haines and Milley, might feel under pressure from Congress to do so.
From what I've seen, the ethno-cultural divide, if there is one, are that the ones that I would view as patrician-types are often more refined in their presentation. Mellon is careful about what he says, although he indicates that he thinks that UAP are real and a serious concern. Haines, Milley, and McMaster say things like "there are puzzling things out there that we don't understand and are hard to get to the bottom of," Ratcliffe and Gallaudet refer to having seen direct video/photographic evidence, Brennan circumspectly suggests that UAP might be a type of life, and Malmgren – who is now almost 90 – decided to go on Twitter and tell the world that he was told about "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissel (of the CIA and NRO). Perhaps Malmgren behaves a bit differently because (he says) he was never under an official oath – Bissel spoke to him informally. But I'd be genuinely interested in which of the above people you classify as "serious" and which you don't – I'm very interested in American ethnography, and it would make my day if you did an assessment of them.
On the UFO topic, I am inclined to agree that normal "heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up" don't apply. But I don't think that they apply to "serious" members of the US military on this topic either. People who are cleared into SAPs (special access programs) are, apparently, supposed to lie if directly asked about a SAP they are cleared into, and most of the people on the above list are or have been read into such programs. UFO fans often assume that this means that the people in the military who talk about UFOs are telling the truth and the people who are denying knowledge of them are lying, but I would remind people that the knife of deception may cut both ways.
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