Shrike
10mo ago
I'm also not sure that massive strikes against population centers would be nearly as common as predicted, at least once targeting was good enough to hit something smaller than "that city over there" (although I imagine it would depend on the exact scenario) but even at the height of the Cold War, there were just so many military targets to hit that maximizing for casualties instead of enemy military capability was arguably not the smartest play. Unfortunately a lot of military targets are colocated with large population centers.
But people read the "number of nuclear weapons" and forget that during the Cold War we were planning, at various points, of using those weapons on military targets, and not just bases, but ships, submarines, troop formations, and enemy aircraft – hence the development of nuclear-tipped torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and anti-ship missiles.
Fallout and radiation poisoning could be bad if someone deliberately tried to maximize it, but conventional nuclear weapons just aren't as dirty as people seem to think. People survived Hiroshima within a thousand feet of ground zero. The guy who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from radiation poisoning...and lived to be 93.
Shrike
10mo ago
Child labor is an interesting consideration along these lines.
I seem to recall that union concerns (shrinking the size of the labor pool) was originally part of the motivation there as well, though.
Shrike
10mo ago
Yeah, I suspect people really don't consider the degree to which illegal labor props up some low prices. I suspect that a lot of stuff (like house remodeling, landscape jobs, etc.) would undergo decent price spikes if someone snapped their fingers and relocated illegal immigrants back to their home countries – at least regionally. But a regional spike in something like meatpacking can raise prices nationwide.
Shrike
10mo ago
I wonder if Abbott is trying to go up to SCOTUS for Arizona v. U.S. round 2?
Shrike
10mo ago
Interesting, although I am skeptical that the .223 is less lethal than a .45, and if the ".45 more dangerous than 9mm" debate had finally been concluded, I must have missed it. I definitely do not think that bullet diameter is the be-all end-all of firearm lethality (for instance, the 5.7mm proved very lethal during the Fort Hood shooting, but the perp survived 4 9mm rounds.)
I also would have thought the old timey criminals (at least in the cities, maybe not moonshiners and the like) would have been more likely to use a lower-powered cartridge like a .32 or a .380, say, 40 years ago, before the rise of the 9mm.
However I suppose it's possible that at the ranges most shootings happen, the 9mm and .223 tend to over-penetrate compared to the .45 or a magnum revolver.
Shrike
10mo ago
My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.
There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.
Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that
- Europe has always been more sexually libertine than the United States, and
- ergo, Europeans are better adjusted to a sexually libertine lifestyle than Americans at any historical point
This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.
Shrike
10mo ago
Was Russia collecting tax revenues from Crimea and other Ukrainian territories prior to Euromaidan?
If they pull off 20% or so of Ukraine, it will be a net win in both manpower (immediately, even if they lose 100K soldiers) and resources/finances (over a long enough timeline) for Russia. Presumably one has to balance that against notational losses from sanctions – I think it's too early to tell what the long-term impact of that will be (at least for someone of my questionable economic competence).
Having neutral Scandinavian states jump to NATO definitely is an L, but they have nowhere near the military potential of Ukraine.
It's definitely untrue to say that this has happened at no cost to the US; it is significantly depleted US/NATO's capabilities, although I think that probably counts as a W for the United States IF it can get its act together industrially, as a weakened Europe with an angry Russia at the door substantially increases US influence there (or should, anyway). It has also given Russia a lot of insight into some high-end NATO weaponry, but that knife cuts both ways.
(Important caveat that I think is under-appreciated by most people going on about how severe the impact of NATO contributions to Ukraine has been on Western war readiness: US doctrine is more air-centric than Russia's, so emptying out our artillery reserves is compensated for somewhat by the fact that we probably have tens of thousands of JDAMs still in reserve. Sure, we've given some to Ukraine, but they just can't use them enough to significantly deplete our stocks, I don't think.)
Shrike
10mo ago
Minor nitpick – at least going by GDP, Texas has a considerably larger economy than the Netherlands (2.4 trillion USD vs. 1 trillion, and headed towards 2 trillion ). Texas population is also considerably larger (30 million vs. 17 million) so it stands to reason.
On the substance of the proposals, I will be very interested in seeing how a lot of these go. I suspect that the currency one will be more useful for speculating in gold than for use as an actual currency, based on looking into the details of the proposal a while back (unless details change).
School choice might end up being the most impactful in the long run, particularly if it sets off a cascade and pushes other states to do the same. Could have considerable impacts on education.
Shrike
10mo ago
This is a very interesting suggestion that I'd love to see get fleshed out more. It seems to me that it might suggest the root cause of what you call 'idpol preoccupation" isn't necessarily liberal/conservative ideology as much as real-world experience or a lack thereof, but perhaps you would take that in a different direction.
I wonder if Jonathan Haidt's work positing that liberals rely less on moral values involving respect for authority, ingroup/outgroup distinctions, and disgust might tie in here.
Shrike
11mo ago
It seems like "picking a successor" is very low-hanging fruit that isn't very often picked in US politics. Or am I missing some good examples? Is there an argument that Reagan did that successfully with H.W., and then H.W. did that successfully with George W., as part of an intentional plan, or is that typically taken to be happenstance and situational maneuvering?
It seems like planning your successor, if you are a popular president, is a really easy and obvious thing to do. But I guess the issue is getting everyone else on board with that. There's a lot more demand for the Office of the Presidency than there is supply...
Shrike
11mo ago
Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.
Worth pointing out for the record that something that seems to be exactly this has in fact happened. At least twice.
Shrike
11mo ago
To be clear, my position isn't "do_something should agree that aliens exist." It is "if research into UFOs by other countries is a good reason to take UFOs seriously, then do_something should take UFOs seriously." Apologies if that was unclear; I was responding to a limited portion of your post, not endorsing OP's position. I think you can make an argument for taking UFOs seriously without leaping to the assumption that they are aliens.
And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)
Perhaps. The specific definition of UAP in US law, enacted by Congress, makes reference to "transmedium devices" which are defined as not immediately identifiable objects that are "observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water." It seems like if people in positions of power are seeing blurry dots, they are seeing them do some pretty unusual things. Or, as you allude to, there is a widespread conspiracy to make it seem that way (as has been suggested in The Motte in the past).
But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible".
It's funny you should say that – the current claims by whistleblowers like Grusch et. al. (and what seems to be the current consensus of the "UFO community," if that loose conglomeration of individuals can be said to have such a consensus) looks much closer to "angels as described in the Bible" than it does to (say) "aliens as described in War of the Worlds or Footfall."
Shrike
11mo ago
Yes, absolutely, although I would expect such work to be integrated into the typical air defense network or bumped into a classified program (which might dovetail into all the rumors about SECRET UFO PROGRAMS – yes probably we don't want our enemies to know what we do and don't know about their classified programs). Setting up a public-facing program like BlueBook or Geipan makes more sense as a PR effort than a secret project to spy on enemy spy craft, and I think is a more parsimonious explanation, especially considering that, despite contemporary concerns, there almost certainly weren't Soviet spy aircraft buzzing our nuclear installations in the late 1940s but there were enough UFO reports that defense officials worried they would overwhelm defense channels.
If you follow the link-trail I threw out, though, you can see DNI Ratcliffe alleging that there are objects that
- Don't fit the profile of "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about," and
- are picked up on multiple sensors, including satellites, at the same time, which is interesting in the context of long-running rumors US satellites have detected objects entering the atmosphere from outer space.
We know, from declassified NRO documents, that the NRO's satellites have detected at least one small object that "did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections" and seemed to resemble the "tic-tac" UAP (although alternative possibilities are discussed and the sighting is considered "low confidence") and that the NRO's "Sentient" image processing software may have a "UAP detection" mode.
I don't think anyone should consider that a slam dunk for extraterrestrial life but I do think it's noteworthy that the intelligence community appears to have internal conversations around things like "can we use our image analysis program to look for UAPs."
Shrike
11mo ago
Sure, this is fairly easy – the USA has run a number of investigations, most (in)famously Project BlueBook, back in the day. See also Project Grudge, Project Sign. There is a lot of controversy/smoke over what exactly the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was doing, but it certainly seems to have involved research into UFOs.
When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein, but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life" and the current and former Director of National Intelligence have suggested there is some form of advanced technology that does not have a prosaic origin being detected by US sensors. As far as Presidents go, Obama hasn't gone quite that far, but he does seem to take the issue seriously.
France has a very small official UFO group called GEIPAN.
The USSR had a UFO investigation unit during the Cold War. I think it's worth taking this with a grain of salt since from what I can tell the popular reporting on this is basely largely on hearsay, whereas in the United States there are a lot of now-declassified documents indicating at least some legitimate government interest (such as by e.g. Edgar Hoover). I believe there are also Soviet documents "smuggled out of Russia" after the Cold War ended, but I'm not sure how confident one should be in their legitimacy.
China seems to have a UFO investigation unit currently, although there is little known about it from what I have seen, and it seems plausible that it is doing it to keep up with the United States/get a handle on prosaic atmospheric clutter.
I don't think any of this makes the jump to "aliens" but it does suggest powerful and presumably rational actors take the issue of UFOs/UAP seriously, or have reasons to pretend to.
(I realize this is a very weird comment to drag one out of perpetually lurking, but, uh, in my defense it's not all that often that it's comparatively easy to make someone take anything seriously?)
It's 100% true that Israel spies on the United States, but this is very normal (for example, the US was caught spying on Germany, and France is apparently notorious for running SIGINT collections at international military exercises) in international relations. FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.
And it's 100% not true that China or Taiwan isn't lobbying (Taiwan definitely does) or spying on it (China definitely does).
(A historical aside, but I am not sure anything Israel has done has been as consequential as the coordinated British effort, which included espionage, to get us into the World Wars. The Zimmerman note would never have come to light if it was not for British espionage on US diplomatic traffic.)
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