TheDemonRazgriz
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User ID: 3577
TheDemonRazgriz
2d ago
Wild. Is that relatively normal, asking for vaccine proof at an event? Or was this one just run by committed weirdos? Either way that really is crazy to me, I had no idea people like that were still out there at a scale where they could end up running a speed-dating event, especially if it wasn’t explicitly branded as a “special” zero-covid event.
TheDemonRazgriz
3d ago
I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.
Last year?!? If you don’t mind saying, where do you live? Or was this hosted by some oddball organization? Genuinely curious. I live in a deep-blue city, I do still see “maskies” out and about, but I haven’t seen an event hand out masks in a very long time. And asking for proof of vaccination in 2025 is basically incomprehensible to me, that was already dying out here (again, deep-blue area) by 2023 at the very latest, and realistically I don’t recall actually being asked to show it later than 2022.
TheDemonRazgriz
8d ago
I don’t have the source at hand, but I recall reading that most of them felt proud. IIRC the example I’m thinking of was about the pilots who flew captured German fighters in the 1947 war. The attitude was basically “our enemy has been vanquished, we outlasted him, and now we get to spit on his grave by using his own tools to secure our future.”
TheDemonRazgriz
12d ago
Pathetically whacking the hotel’s sign with a snow shovel is a far cry from, say, the BLM riots, or the anti-ICE riots in Cali a few months back. Vandalism is still bad but it’s not on the same level as what would be implied, to me, by “violence” (it’s not looting, it’s not arson, it’s not even trashing the hotel that’s being picketed). No one, including ICE agents, has been injured or killed by a protestor in Minneapolis.
Edit: immediately after posting I remembered that the agent who shot Renee Good had been bruised by her car. So, correction, one person has been injured by Minneapolis protestors, and none killed.
TheDemonRazgriz
13d ago
The protestors are not causing the violence, this time. No looting, no burning cop cars, no trashing local businesses…
TheDemonRazgriz
13d ago
Man, I wish I had a relative who could/would give me 10 grand in precious metals… I always get a sweater or a book or something for Christmas!
Great post.
I think it's safe to say that Xi is a very severe, ideologically driven actor who just Does Not Like Corruption. There's no parallel to Putin or Maduro or whatever. I don't know why this is so hard for people to accept, we've known such autocrats in the 20th century.
I very much agree with this. Frankly, it’s a big part of what scares me about Xi’s China. By all appearances he is a cruel and ambitious dictator, but is also a competent administrator and a genuine statesman who cares about the future of his country. It is true that his many rounds of purges have included his personal political enemies, and in part this is because everyone is at least a little corrupt in the CCP and so you can get anyone on “corruption” if you want to, but it is also because being (too) corrupt makes you into one of Xi’s personal political enemies. Americans (and the general West) don’t like to engage in this kind of thought because the idea of a dictator sincerely motivated by rooting out corruption is aesthetically icky, and this willful blind spot leads to a lot of overconfidence relative to China.
Unlike many (most?) other dictators, his personal ambitions seem to be wrapped up in national ambitions in a harmonious way. The likes of Maduro (or Saddam Hussein, etc) are motivated primarily by personal wealth and the security of their own family; the success of the nation is good only secondarily and in as much as it further entrenches their personal wealth and power. Even Putin, who clearly does have some degree of grand national ambition to recreate a Russian Empire for the 21st century, clearly puts the personal wealth of himself and his allies first. In practice he rules more like a mafia don than a king (in some ways literally, as the government still has close connections with various criminal and quasi-legal enterprises) and has built his power explicitly on personal and transactional relationships with the country’s various powerful oligarchs. The idea of even partially earnest corruption purges in Putin’s Russia is laughable in a way which is not true for Xi’s China. The case in point is the state of the Russian army, which was allowed to degrade enormously (or, at least, not seriously pressured to improve) under his rule, as we saw in the catastrophic failure of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Xi also, at least so far, does not seem to show signs of the over-ambitious ideological derangement that characterized the likes of Hitler and would get in the way of successful leadership, or lead to delusional overreach. China surely does suffer from all the classic informational problems of dictatorships and (relatively) closed societies but they appear to be at least trying to mitigate that weakness.
This is not to say that Xi is some mystical paragon of leadership, or that China does not have problems with corrupt and incompetent leaders. In particular their managed economy is showing some weaknesses that could become much worse in the near future if not addressed (for example, the infamous real estate bubble). But he is a qualitative step up from the average dictator and should be taken seriously. In particular he appears to value long-term planning and a long-term legacy, and if nothing else does seem to view corruption as a problem which must be mitigated rather than a natural fact of life.
The emphasis on forward-looking strategy (his big legacy looks to be “Xi Jinping thought”, the anti-corruption campaigns, and the modernization of the army and navy) is relatively unique to China in the modern world (notably, another country I can think of in this frame is Kim Jong-Un’s DPRK, provided you grade on a North Korean curve), and is certainly better than the long-term planning of Russia, America, or Europe these days — and that is dangerous. The Chinese emphasis on industrial dominance in critical sectors is unique and presents a massive and still-growing threat to American dominance of world affairs. In some ways the best hope for America to “win” against China, given current trajectories, is for Xi to become impatient as he ages and to kick off a war before the PLA is ready. That’s pretty cold comfort.
TheDemonRazgriz
14d ago
That’s not better. “Yeah, we’re going to import a permanent underclass to keep your wages low, and it’ll push up housing prices while degrading your local culture too, but don’t worry, we won’t treat them like human beings.” It’s not much of a sales pitch.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
People already know you can’t run over a cop. This does nothing against panic.
the lack of even preliminary SEAD/DEAD
This is not really true, there were substantial airstrikes on air defense assets for a few hours before the helicopters arrived, continuing through their arrival. Details are still limited as of now but the pre-positioned US assets included over 100 fixed-wing aircraft including fighters, bombers, and EW/jammers. All on an extremely short timetable, absolutely, but the image of the helicopters just popping up in the capital (in the largest military base, in fact) without support is not correct, this was a really enormous and tightly-timed air operation.
While pretty much all of the large-scale and medium to long range anti-air equipment in the area seems to have been destroyed by US airstrikes, it is definitely notable that there seemed to be no serious presence of Venezuelan MANPADS. One US helicopter was hit but not shot down, which could have been from an Igla, but that’s pretty minimal. The Venezuelans were supposed to have something like 5000 Iglas available, even if many existed only on-paper you’d think the ones they did have would be clustered around Maduro and, again, the largest and best-defended military base in the country.
The US had a fleet of RQ-170 stealth drones overhead during the operation, is it possible they were able to observe all of the anti-air troops setting up and blow them away with air support? This certainly could have contributed but is somewhere between extremely unlikely and impossible at scale. Were the Venezuelans simply in such disarray from the shock-and-awe raid that they couldn’t muster their defenses in time? This seems to be the case. The Venezuelan army is large, but not exactly known for high standards of training or strong morale. We’ll find out more in time but by all appearances they didn’t really believe this raid was going to happen and were taken totally by surprise. The speed and coordination with which the first airstrikes took place seems to have both ruined their defensive plans and scared the absolute pants off the defenders. It seems likely to me that large swaths of troops probably ran away or hid rather than die for Maduro, once the bombs started falling. And by the time they would’ve started reorganizing, the whole thing was already over!
There are rumors that at least some of the Venezuelan army knew about the raid ahead of time but this seems unlikely imo, at least at scale, the chance for a leak would be too great. We do know the CIA had at least one asset reporting on Maduro’s whereabouts at essentially all times, so clearly they were infiltrated, but that’s very different from whole army units defecting at once (and not telling anyone). Fear and disorganization seem like plenty of motivation, without any conspiracy needed.
Edit: I forgot to include, in my mention of Venezuelan disarray, that (according to Trump) the US also used some sort of nebulous cyberwarfare capability to selectively shut down power to parts of Caracas, and presumably forcing the military bases to run on back up power. This is a very effective way to instill fear and disorder in its own right. It also allows the possibility of even greater penetration into Venezuelan military and/or civil infrastructure systems, this is not necessarily true but could have been another contributing factor to the seemingly spectacular disorganization of the Venezuelan army.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Maduro’s wife is (was) an actually-significant political figure in the regime, getting both of them would be necessary for any kind of clean regime change plan. If nothing else she would make a great figurehead for a continuation government, there’s a fair chance she would’ve been the successor had only Maduro been grabbed.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
I’m American and my company uses a single pool of PTO. It’s a small startup-esque company, so maybe that plays a role? I will say that my friends in tech (I’m a mechanical engineer) have simultaneously better PTO policies and worse PTO cultures than anyone else I know. Plenty of allowed time off and they barely use it.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
I’ll admit it took me a few tries the first time I saw it too, lol, it’s just a “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle. It’s 2 pairs of thematically-matching images and 1 odd one out.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Are you just supposed to pretend they don't exist, or something?
Everything I’ve seen out of Britain in the last few years suggests that yes, this is exactly what a Good Subject is supposed to do.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
Under modern customs, irregular combatants are not considered total outlaws and are still expected to be treated properly as POWs. I'm not sure if this is explicitly codified in international law or in US military policy, but it is certainly the general case. For example, even when fighting Al Qaeda or the Taliban, coalition forces were not allowed to summarily execute surrendering enemies (which is essentially what the Navy is being accused of in this case). The clearest example of this is the case from a few years back where an Australian special operations unit was found to have executed a group of Taliban prisoners because they could not fit them into their helicopter. The fact that the Taliban troops were neither regular military nor civilians did not protect the Australian soldiers from prosecution.
This doesn't even get into the question of whether the drug runners should really be classed as "combatants" in the first place as opposed to merely "criminals". If they are properly classified as criminals then these strikes are summary executions (or arguably just murder), not legitimate combat, and would be illegal anyway... but that's not really what's at issue here.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
Appreciate the thoughtful response -- I don't think we actually disagree very much here.
I'm pretty sure that if the ship still has significant ability to fight despite it's disability, a belligerent would be permitted, under the rules of war, to continue attacking the ship until it no longer poses a threat. Even if the continued attacks will inevitably result in crew deaths.
Agreed. I was using "disabled" to mean "firmly out of action", i.e. removed from combat and neutralized as a threat. So:
If this is your claim, that it's a war crime to specifically attack the survivors of a ship that is disabled and sinking, then this is a more defensible position.
The ship literally sinking is not necessarily part of my claim, it could be dead in the water, but I agree that if the enemy ship is still moving or shooting it is plainly a legitimate target. I would phrase my claim as "it is a war crime to intentionally attack the surviving crew of a ship which has been neutralized or sunk."
Can you please provide a specific cite to the provision of international law which you believe applies here?
I am not a lawyer and at best an armchair historian, but yes, I was able to find this portion of the Geneva Conventions, which should at least be illustrative: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-12/commentary/2017. This comes from the 1949 version of the Conventions; I believe that there is some similar provision in older versions or in some other older treaty, I think from the Hague in 1899, but I couldn't immediately find a source for that. It is considered applicable today, in any case. I also believe there are similar provisions in some other treaties (e.g. UNCLOS) but again I think the Geneva Conventions are illustrative enough on their own (also, if memory serves, the USA is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions but not of UNCLOS anyway). I am fairly confident that what is formalized in the Geneva Conventions was considered the proper way of doing things by custom for a long time, but I admittedly don't have a source at hand for that, it's just from my vaguely recollected history knowledge. Regardless, the historical aspect is only tangential to what is being discussed here.
Anyway. The relevant portion is the discussion of "wounded, sick, and shipwrecked" combatants, under Article 12. The set of [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] is used throughout the convention as a coherent category, and in short the point of the convention is that [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] enemy personnel should be rescued as POWs and given medical attention, to the best of the ability of the prisoner-taking side, and generally treated as required by all other protections for POWs. This is all pretty clear and straightforward, so what is at issue here is who counts as "shipwrecked". This is defined as follows:
“shipwrecked” means persons, … who are in peril at sea or in other waters as a result of misfortune affecting them or the vessel or aircraft carrying them and who refrain from any act of hostility
Further:
A person does not need to be in an acutely life- or health-threatening situation to be ‘shipwrecked’ for the purposes of Article 12. Persons who find themselves involuntarily in the water or on board a burning ship are covered.
And:
Persons on a fully disabled ship, or a ship that has run aground, whose situation is dangerous but not necessarily imminently life-threatening, are also covered, as long as they also refrain from any act of hostility
So, this quite directly supports my claim. If a US Navy officer ordered a follow-up strike on a neutralized ship in order to kill its crew, that would indeed be a war crime. Crucially, for the act to be criminal, the victorious party must knowingly fire on a disabled ship, and that's what's really at issue in the present case. The Geneva Convention discusses repeatedly that it is important for the defeated crew to be "refraining from hostilities", which generally seems to be interpreted as not firing (not remotely at issue here) and not maneuvering or otherwise attempting to complete a mission. This is what I was trying to get at in my first post. If the Navy simply fired two missiles at the boat, one after the other, that clearly would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, believed it to still be operational, then fired again to sink it, this would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, confirmed through surveillance that it was disabled but had survivors, then fired again to finish off the crew, this would be a war crime.
You dismiss the second case as "pretty unlikely", but that is exactly what the Navy/DoD is being accused of doing, which is why it is being treated as a Big Deal. In previous strikes on drug boats the Navy has released very clear targeting footage from drones and other aircraft showing the weapon impacts and aftermath, so it's unrealistic to think that they outright could not see the boat. In the absence of any released targeting footage it is impossible for the public to determine conclusively whether a war crime was committed. All we know for a fact is that two missiles were fired at the boat. If targeting footage shows two swift impacts that would plainly disprove a war crime. If targeting footage shows an impact, then a clear view of a burning boat with crew either on the deck or in the water, then another impact, that would prove a war crime, or at least would be very strong evidence. They would have to somehow prove that the second shot was fired without knowing that the boat was disabled and/or without knowing there were surviving crew members.
They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.
That’s true, but I don’t think it would’ve been considered “proper” conduct. They might sink a pirate ship and leave without making a rescue attempt but I don’t think they’d finish off survivors. And it would be more a case of “nobody is going to miss them anyway” rather than active policy. Certainly many pirates were captured from sunk/defeated ships, then tried and jailed/whipped/executed according to the law. Admittedly I got a bit carried away with the historical analogies, I have some knowledge but I’m far from an expert and it’s not a perfect parallel to the issue at hand anyway.
Part of the (legal) problem is that the anti-drug operation is being justified in no small part by declaring the smugglers to be irregular combatants (narco-terrorists) affiliated with the Venezuelan government. If they are merely ordinary drug smugglers then the Navy should not be sinking their boats at all, per US law, and doing so would be criminal. But if they are combatants then the strike would be a war crime. There’s no version of modern law where killing the survivors after destroying the boat is legal/acceptable conduct.
Edit: @KMC as well
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
You are very right, thanks for adding that. It’s a similar path of Chinese pharmaceuticals -> drug gangs with labs -> smuggled across the land border. The “essentially all through Mexico” theory is a few years out of date; I don’t know how much of that is actual change on the ground and how much is just increased awareness of northern-border drug running. I do think the majority is still assumed to be coming from Mexico but the Canadian side is very much not negligible.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
(It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).
As far as I know, the consensus view is that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl on US streets takes the following route:
- Precursor/component chemicals are produced in China by pharmaceutical companies.
- These components are shipped from China to Mexico. Some of this is smuggled in (e.g. triad-to-cartel B2B relationships), some is legally shipped and acquired by cartels later. The Chinese government may or may not be facilitating this process.
- The actual fentanyl is produced by the Mexican cartels, in drug labs throughout Mexico.
- Fentanyl is smuggled into the US over the land border. The potency of fentanyl means tiny volumes comprise many doses so this is not very hard to get away with on a useful scale, much easier than basically any other drug.
- Once in the US, the fentanyl is distributed around the country through traditional criminal channels until it eventually reaches the street-level dealers.
Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
Simply firing two missiles at the boat would not be a war crime (well, there’s an argument to be made that these operations in general constitute extrajudicial executions more than warfare, I personally have mixed thoughts about it, but obviously for this discussion we’re assuming the combat itself is legitimate). The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off. This is unambiguously a war crime today and has always been considered egregious misconduct. Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.
The concept is the same as how you don’t shoot at a pilot who has ejected from a shot-down plane, and is therefore no longer part of the battle. If you kill him in the process of shooting him down, c’est la vie, but if he bails out and you circle back to blow him away on his parachute, that’s beyond the pale.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
As an aside, this is the biggest source of my AI skepticism. AI will not be able to be useful at scale unless it is truly reliable, which the current state of the art emphatically is not. The problem is not merely that it can fail to complete a task, but that it confidently pretends to have succeeded. In fact the models do not seem to be capable of differentiating on their own between success and pretend-success. This puts a hard limit on what kind of tasks they can perform and at what scale. People like to talk about working with an LLM assistant as like having a fast-working junior employee always at your beck and call (you can offload your tasks but you’ll need to check its work), but for most applications it seems more like having a dodgy outsourcing firm on-call. Not only do you have to check its work, its errors are bizarre and can be deeply hidden, and it will always project total confidence whether the results are perfect or nonexistent.
The lack of progress on this front by any of the major LLM companies makes me think it’s going to take a fairly significant breakthrough to fix, not merely “moar compute,” which makes the aggressive push for AI-everything seem… premature, shall we say. Certainly it does not seem to me that AGI is just around the corner.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I seriously doubt the average woman who signs up for military service anywhere in the world normally does so at the age of 18
What? Why? At least in the US the large majority of people who enlist do so directly out of high school, or shortly after, so age 18 or 19. What intuition is leading you away from those ages?
Flaunting his flouting?
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have.
This, in my opinion, is the largest problem facing the modern US public education system: total collapse of standards for the lowest levels (and that level seems to be creeping ever higher over time). The compounding effect of a kid being passed ahead without learning the previous year’s curriculum is ruinous. On top of the direct problems of incapacity, it teaches kids that actually learning things in school doesn’t matter and so there’s no need to try, while also simultaneously teaching the more studious kids that any setback is a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (because if no one ever gets a C on anything then it must be really unforgivably bad). Similar problems with discipline/behavior only compound the issue further.
For example, you may have heard of the “Mississippi miracle”, where Mississippi public schools have gone from rock-bottom for reading skills to top-10 in the country in a very short time (and one of the only states to show improvement at all), and without any significant spending increase. There are two reasons for this, and they’re excruciatingly simple: they changed to a “back to basics” reading-and-writing curriculum focused on core competency at young ages and without assuming the kids were reading or being read to at home; and they made it significantly easier for schools to hold back students who weren’t reading at grade level.
Lol, yeah, IME “inclusive” often translates to “weird ultra-liberals only” for this kind of thing. I imagine equivalent orgs are out there in my own city too, although again I really thought the proof of vaccination stuff had died out ages ago. As for the inexplicable-yet-predictable masking-queerness correlation, I’m reminded of that tweet that went something like “I’ll believe long covid is real when I see someone who isn’t bisexual have it.” Good luck out there…
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