SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Biden is no doubt guilty of many felonies himself. The Clintons have as well. Yet they have not been prosecuted and for good reason.
Uhh, those are some bold statements. Bill did get himself impeached for lying about his affair.
Trump has flagrantly played fast/loose with the law for years. He literally refused to cooperate when the feds said “please give the classified documents back.” His brazen approach was going to catch up with him.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Bush and Powell weren’t lying about WMDs. They honestly believed they were there.
Was there a bunch of motivated reasoning and shoddy analysis of poor evidence that got them (and many others) to hold those beliefs? Yes.
The US intel community failed to resist “spin” on various reports and assessments, but it was basically taken for granted that Saddam had had a WMD program before and still was pursuing one in 2003. There wasn’t definitive evidence that he didn’t, and there was crappy evidence that he did. Motivated reasoning and the emotional environment after 9/11 did the rest.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Not like Trump did. He refused to concede and he and his close associates pushed all manner of blatant nonsense that failed to get any traction because of a stark lack of evidence.
As with many things, it’s not that no one else in politics has ever done Bad Thing, it’s that Trump finds a way to take things to a new level.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
“Directionally correct”
The man has been lying for years about election fraud, even when he won (and didn’t mount an investigation).
Trump is an embarrassment to conservatism, morally and politically, and should have been jettisoned by the GOP years ago. He makes things worse by inflaming progressivism and turning away moderates/centrists, and the sooner he’s gone from political life the better.
Sure, this state-level prosecution was targeted/politically motivated, which I consider bad, but the man is a constant liar with no regard for rules/laws/norms, so he set himself up for this kind of thing.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
It is an incredible irony that Christianity was the root of antisemitism for so long, but in America the Evangelicals are extremely strong Zionists.
The center is always attacked by the extremes, which doesn’t indicate correctness.
Christianity is a large set of possible beliefs and so it’s very easy to choose one’s own adventure. As a former believer, there’s a lot of good and bad in there.
Frankly, I wish the GOP would prefer a more WASPy Christian candidate than Trump, but MAGA is low class Christianity and a bit too forgiving.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
My guy you seriously tried to argue Russian forces didn’t have a numerical advantage in the opening phase of the war and now you think I have the LLM-tier understanding here?
You think that makes Russian air defense look better? During an ongoing war a little civ aircraft just makes it through?
That’s the literal definition of Russia not controlling its airspace!
Russia demonstrably sucks at war fighting and here you are trying to pretend that somehow things would go better against an adversary far more capable than Ukraine is.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
My understanding is the Ukrainians have been able to penetrate Russian airspace pretty regularly and that a lack of munitions and the West desiring them to limit attacks on Russian soil are the limiting factors. Not the impressive performance of the Russian Air Force or air defense systems.
The US has a lot more aircraft and missiles that are far more capable than what the Ukrainians have.
It’s a bad sign that Russia has to source drones from Iran.
I didn’t say against a peer.
Russia is, ostensibly, not fighting a peer either.
The fact that Ukraine and Russia are basically peers is my whole goddamn point actually.
Pretend the situation was reversed. Do you think the US would be struggling to win against Ukraine (assume Russian material support)?
I think not.
Also, if you’re trying to pretend Russia didn’t have a numerical advantage in the initial invasion then good lord. Ukraine’s standing army was like 200k, and it wasn’t necessarily all deployed where the Russian invasion started.
Think about how stupid it would be for the Russians to invade a foe they didn’t have outnumbered and outgunned where they were conducting operations. So you can choose: either the Russians are morons or they suck at fighting.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
Note that you’re avoiding the main point that Russia demonstrably sucks against a weaker foe, let alone a peer or more.
But also, imagine thinking the US needs air superiority to be effective at combined arms on the ground.
It’s even funnier to think the US wouldn’t have air superiority against the joke of Russian capabilities we’ve seen.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
In a defensive war, Ukraine merely needs to not have lost already to demonstrate my point. They were and are outnumbered and outgunned, and yet the Russians’ initial campaign was a disaster and now any victory is going to come slowly and with high cost.
The US had no problem dealing with IQ militias in force-on-force engagements. It wasn’t a military problem, it was a police problem.
You’re clearly not interested in objectively considering military capabilities if you’re unwilling to acknowledge Russia has significantly underperformed against Ukraine, and are incapable of separating the US military being able to destroy a foe in a force-on-force engagement vs. trying to do COIN, which is extremely different.
The US military has performed very well whenever it has conducted force-on-force operations, in terms of both logistics and combat. We barely took a scratch. Russia cannot say the same, and has taken heavy losses among its best forces.
Before Ukraine, you could make a reasonable argument that Russia would do well against the US in combat. After what we’ve seen, that is a laughable assertion that flies in the face of all available evidence and it’s embarrassing that others have to point that out to you.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
Wow. Imagine how bad Russia would fare against a foe that was already trained and equipped with that top-tier weaponry you described and proficient in combined arms and maneuver warfare?
Seems like that would go poorly for them.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
Based on how the Russians have conducted themselves so badly against a weaker foe, I remain confused why you think they would fare well against the US, which wiped the floor with weaker foes.
Russian IQ ain’t helping them much. You can also look at how well they fought the Taliban back in the day compared to the US. We steamrolled them and barely took any casualties.
But RuSsiA HaS sO mUcH aRtiLleRy.
It wouldn’t last long from precision counterfire and air superiority. Those Iranian drones won’t do so hot either, based on the turkey shoot when used against Israel.
What’s laughable here is talking up the Russian military where they are literally in the midst of struggling mightily against a weaker opponent and saying they would do well in a 1v1 against the US, which has long had far better equipment, training, logistics, and intelligence than the Russians. And maintenance. Can’t forget that.
Like how badly would the Russians have to do in Ukraine before you would consider “ah yeah they were way overrated”?
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Russia demonstrably can’t even make convoys happen efficiently.
The US military would wipe the floor with Russia, even before they burned up the bulk of their forces against a far weaker opponent than the US.
The Russian military underperformed expectations quite badly.
In contrast, the US military wiped the floor with the Iraqis twice. People forget that Saddam had, on paper, one of the best militaries in the world.
It’s easy to focus on the challenges of COIN and forget the massively successful campaigns in IQ and AF that proceeded the occupation phase.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
This is well put.
Economists in particular are way more utilitarian than the average person because they are trained in math and principles that highlight how to increase overall “wellbeing.”
(They’re also more libertarian/free market than average for the same reasons.)
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Yeah the level of analysis and scope matters a lot here.
It’s not on me, personally, to do the moral calculus as a perfectly wise, impartial judge with universal scope.
But I definitely want government policy to be doing cost-benefit analysis, focusing on efficiency, and the “greater good,” so long as it is done so in a way that doesn’t run completely roughshod over individual rights.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
The Founding Fathers were intimately aware of the problems with religious warfare and bad monarchs.
So they built upon English common law and designed a government with competing branches, federalism, and individual liberty. To promote the general welfare.
Utilitarianism is a particular form of consequentialism, which I assure you is pretty concerned with cause and effect as it relates to moral outcomes.
Standard economics and public policy are essentially aligned with rule utilitarianism because they are typically focused on increasing public wellbeing/wealth within the confines of our legal system.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Simultaneously, I completely agree with your breakdown of “white” being difficult/impossible, but also I can totally understand what the white nationalists aspire to.
Oh man, I just assumed you knew about Twitter “per capita discourse.” I don’t even know where to start. How about fire alarms chirping?
At any rate, what you wrote here seems fine. It was just in the podcast where I was perplexed about your reaction.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
I think this is a classic example of misusing homus economicus in a contrived scenario that has no real bearing on reality.
Life is full of iterated games and reality is complex.
Your scenario does nothing to highlight a problem with rule utilitarianism so far as I can tell.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
I reject your framing here.
Standard Econ and political science in the Western tradition has long been effectively rule utilitarian.
Sacred tradition is also frequently utilitarian.
“Self-evident natural human rights” being based on deontology plays exactly into my description above about how rule utilitarians love to take the best parts of deontology and virtue ethics.
In essence, you’re saying “those things did not originate by people explicitly using rule utilitarianism” and I’m saying “yeah, isn’t that great?”
Consequentialism cares about outcomes. The provenance of how say the US constitution came to be is not nearly so important as the fact that it implements a system that’s aligned with rule utilitarianism.
If you think the constitution is great I don’t see how you don’t like rule utilitarianism in at least some form.
It only does this in the context of valid arguments that protecting individual liberty is in fact such a bulwark/safety-valve, and I don't believe such arguments exist.
I am flabbergasted by this since I’m basically just mirroring the logic the Founding Fathers used to create a system that allowed a lot of liberty to lower the risk of tyranny and internal strife. They did this consciously and explicitly. You can disagree with them, but these arguments have long existed.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
I’m not sure myself whether the genetics of regression to the mean would matter if one was specifically selecting on high-potential individuals of any given race.
For instance, I’d rather select a 115 IQ/otherwise upstanding non-white citizen than some 100 IQ ne’er-do-well from say Norway. After all, you can have “good stock” and “bad breeding” within families of the same race and society. The white underclass is pretty shitty and I wouldn’t want to try enlarging it.
But that’s contingent on being selective.
Mostly, I got the feeling you didn’t know what regression to the mean could mean in the podcast, though I figured you had to know the concept and I would expect you had heard it used in this context before. I got a flash of the “per capita” insanity, but since I’m pretty familiar with your writing and we generally agree on things (not open borders, not sure what else) I was just surprised by it.
I think you have very good points against white nationalism, but in a “punching down” sort of way. There are smarter ones out there, like say Steve Sailer. To your credit, you are straightforward that you can’t pass an ITT, but you did kinda go full lawyer mode instead of letting Walter narrate sufficiently to explain the worldview he used to hold.
It strikes me as strange you can’t pass an IIT in that affinity for one’s kin and preference for similarity in appearance and belief is highly traditional. White nationalists tend to point out examples like Japan and Israel (the latter being more complicated) as their preferred type of country. This is extremely common in Europe too. Obviously, “whiteness” is hard to define in any robust way, but these types have a pretty strong “I know it when I see it” vibe, not strict logical definitions.
That’s my biggest complaint about the episode actually. The podcast would have been better with more structure, with the two-on-one dynamic especially. Honestly I’m impressed you all stayed really chill with how freewheeling it was.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
There was a researcher who got fired for citing research on the existence of the achievement gap.
There was a law professor who remarked that her minority students struggled. It did not go well for her.
The “fact of” is routinely denied and a firing offense in many jobs.
There is magical thinking here that is inconsistent on multiple levels. Progressives want to have their cake and to eat it too, in that obviously systemic racism and various inequities negatively affect minorities, but also acknowledging the effects themselves is racism.
“The next generation” idea has fallen out of favor now that we are multiple generations past the Civil Rights Movement. That’s a major reason “systemic racism” is such a popular concept.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Per the recent podcast episode, I’m not sure he understands “regression to the mean.”
Except this time it’s true.
And one can prove that by ignoring the media rhetoric and listening only to longtime Republicans and former Trump officials who have condemned Trump for a very long list of his personal and professional failings.
It’s funny because one thing so many Trump fans like about him is that he isn’t like normal politicians and doesn’t comply with various norms that supposedly made regular GOP politicians weak. Problem is, some of norms Trump has violated involved actual breaches of the law.
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