TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
The Germans were the ones who opened Pandora's Box by bombing civilian infrastructure in the opening phase of their invasion of Poland. Meanwhile the RAF did not start intentionally targeting civilians until the Luftwaffe made night bombing and the targeting of population center official policy in the latter half of the Battle of Britain.
In short, your claim that the British were the ones to "escalate" the conflict is false.
Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war.
This is a very dumb objection for you to be making here. Either Churchill was a brilliant mastermind who played the German high command (and everyone else in the world) like a fiddle or he was a "warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do". Pick one.
In either case it doesn't adress the issue that the US didn't move against Germany directly until after the Germans had declared war on the US and started shooting at American ships.
Finally "the Madagascar plan" wasn't even proposed until the summer of 1940. Not only were Britain and Germany already at war by that point but Madagascar wasn't even Germany's to give. Forget Churchill, what reason would anyone in the British leadership have to agree to that plan at that time?
Maybe if the Germans had used one of thier own colonies, or an ally's colony, or tried to cut a deal with the global hegemon instead of declaring war on them things would've played out differently but we don't live in that timeline.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Odd, for some reason your comment was showing up as a child of mine. But after refreshing the page it seems to have sorted itself.
Apologies.
(Note i'm on mobile FWIW)
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
What does any of that have to do with anything i said, and how did you type all that out in under 5 minutes?
Also are you under the mistaken impression that the robot shot the guy?
What's the line? Our tools have been rebelling against us since the first farmer stepped on a rake?
The idea that this is some sort of escalation or new and novel threat is frankly just dumb. People have been working on ways to kill eachother remotely since the days of Archimedes. It was a major part of his whole "brand". Im also quite skeptical of the claims that they will be "smarter than the smartest human" and or that we will "lose basically every challenge against them" claims.
The blanket play in the video was actually quite smart if clumsily executed, and as you yourself observed, the thing that actually stopped him was getting shot by a human.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs
No, it is a statement intended to induce the true belief that at least some immigrants have been stealing and eating pets. More generally it is a signal that he is aware of and willing to give voice to his constituents' concerns.
As @Jiro points out below, normal people arent going to care that the pet in question was somebody's kitten instead of somebody's puppy. If people in the US are eating pets, something has gone wrong.
As i said above...
It seems to me that a question we ought to be asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is true or false, so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving anyone or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
I'm hardly the first person to make this observation but it seems to me that Trump "lies" the way a used car salesman "lies". Sure, he'll tell you that Nissan Altima with bald tires at the back of the lot is a good deal, the best deal even, the sort of deal he wouldn't give his own mother, but if pressed he'll admit that its kind of a shitbox and knock 10 - 20% off the price. Normal people who interact with other normal people on a regular basis get this, they even expect it. After all the salesman's job is to sell things and few working class persons are going to begrudge another working class person for doing thier job.
In contrast a lot of what Trump's opponents seem to do is not "lying" directly in the sense of speaking falshoods so much as they are setting out with a specific intention to push a specific narrative and things like lying through omission, false pretenses, and spreading rumors/hearsay are just tools in the tool box.
There seems to be this belief that so long as you are never actually caught in an outright lie you are by definition a good and honest person. If someone is decieved by your intentional misrepresenting of a fact or lie of omission the culpability is not on you for trying to decieve them, its on them for not being being savvy enough to see through your deception.
I think that what we are seeing now is the downstream effects of this attitude. You see politics is by it's nature a multiple itteration game. Unless your plan is to litteraly exterminate everyone and anyone who might disagree with your policy decisions (and to be fair, a number of regimes have actually tried) you're gonna have to cut a second deal with someone at some point and when you do its only natural that they will factor how the first deal played out into thier calculus.
This is the bit that I think Todd and the wider media/managerial class have failed to recognize or othwerwise factor into thier thinking is that a lot of regular people have come to recognize that they got manipulated and are now on guard against it and rather than solving the (alleged) problem all the talk about how normal people are stupid, easy to manipulate, and need to be saved from themselves for democracy's sake is exacerbating it.
As Instapundit would say, they have chosen the form of thier destructor. For the Ghostbusters it was a marshmallow kaiju, for the beltway it was a reality tv star.
When they say "walkie talkies" i suspect that they're talking about something more like this than the cheap ones that are sold in blister-packs at Wal-Mart.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Nevermind Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and both world wars.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Not really no, the Democrats spent pretty much the entire 20th century being the pro-war/international intervention party.
If anything it was thier brief flirtation with being anti-war in the early 2000s that was the surprise.
That's certainly a take.
Firstly, the British didn't initiate the bombing of civilian infrastructure and populations the Germans did, the British were just monumentally better at it because the British had more competent leadership and greater resources to draw upon.
Secondly, Churchill's maneuvering didn't bring the US into the war, the Japanese did. Even then, the US didn’t move against Germany directly until after Germany had declared war on the US and started attacking US shipping in the Atlantic.
Finally, the German decision making process looks especially retarded when you recall that they really ought to have known better. The Belgian example two decades prior had already demonstrated that the Anglos were both ready able to wage a costly war against Germany over the sovereignty of a stupid made up country.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
...anyone who drives commercially.
Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat?
This universe/timeline is clearly a simulation programmed by Hlinka, Instapundit, and the ghost of Tom Wolfe. The rest of us are just living in it. ;-)
If we aren't discussing culpability what exactly are we discussing?
Likewise while it is true that the US had no particular reason to care about Polish sovereignty in 1939, we arent talking about the US in 1939. We are talking about the Poles and the British, both of whom had very obvious reasons to care. The Poles because it was thier sovereignty being threatened and the British because they had made an agreement with the Poles.
If you want to argue that the Poles should've valued thier sovereignty less or that the British should have valued keeping thier word less that is your perogative, but at least make that argument explicit, and provide your reasons why.
I feel like this is a case where you just have to keep an open mind and be willing to update your views.
Im not cuddles but i think i have. Have you? What if my "updated" view is that the russian military is substantially less capable than initially estemated.
I think this is a good example of how attacking 'utilitarianism' is used as a shield to avoid difficult moral choices.
Is it? Or is utilitarianism "a cope" to avoid dealing with the concept of a necessary evil? ie the idea that a decision can be both terrible and correct. Or that bad things will happen as a result of bad actions and that this is a good thing.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Additionaly there is the minor historical issue that the Arab nations already attempted "the united front" against an Isreal without nukes and lost decisively.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
The fundemental problem with utilitarianism is that it depends on a belief that "utilty" is fungible. That x amount of happy puppies can directly offset y number of dead babies or that the suffering of person a can be converted into the enjoyment of another without loss. I do not believe that ethier of these are the case at all.
That's assuming the Germans don't seize Iceland
Yes, i am assuming that because the Germans would've been hard pressed to cross the English Channel nevermind the Straights of Denmark. Operation Sealion is a meme in alternate history forums for a reason.
at which point there would just be MAD.
Doubtful.
Even with a clean win on the eastern front Germany would be resource limited relative the US and without any real means of delivering the nukes, assuming they were built. German bombers and V-weapons were stretching thier legs just to hit London with an 1000 kg payload. Carrying 5 times that to US industrial centers like philidelphia Pittsburgh and Detroit would've been a non-starter. Meanwhile almost all of germany but most importantly Berlin would've been well within the range of nuclear-equipped B29s flying out of Reykjavik. The distances involved would actually be a couple hundred miles shorter (roughly 1,475 miles one-way vs 1,600) and with more favorable winds for most of the year than the historical strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Meanwhile the US and UK also enjoy a substantial advantage in the form of a meaningful surface Navies and an integrated air defence network where as the Germans were still dependent on visual spotting and individual radar equipped aircraft. In short individual allied raiders have a far greater chance of penetrating German terretory than induvidual german raiders do the US or UK. This disparity was the practical justification for the shift towards V weapons in the first place.
It'll be at least the late 40s maybe 1950 before Von Braun can build the Nazis an effective R-7 clone and thats assuming he doesn't drag his feet or the German industrial heartland isn't already sprouting mushroom clouds.
Following what rules exactly?
Why should the British be held as more culpable for waging a war to defend thier allies than those who attacked those allies in the first place?
Why should the pressence (or absence) of WMDs factor into the calculation at all?
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later.
Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant.
What is rellevant is that Moscow thinks Kiev is Russian and Kiev disagreed stongly enough to go to war over the matter.
For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Ill second Castles of Steel as an excellent read.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
I so want it to be true. ;-)
Im not suggesting that it should be. I am mearly pointing out that the difference is one of degree not of kind. A man killed by a rock to the head is just as dead as a man killed by a bullet to the head.
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