there342
3d ago
Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.
This is the point I always have to disagree on. Stuff like HIMARS would absolutely be useful in a Pacific war. Javelins aren't just for killing Russian tanks, they're useful even against insurgents because they are a standoff infantry weapon that can blow up fortifications and stuff - they were expensive, but useful in Iraq. And artillery shells being depleted is a real issue against China, the logistics here are sort of fungible, and spending a lot of resources resupplying Ukraine is going to demand we replace that (we have to be prepared to fight more than just China, a military's job isn't only to prepare for the most obvious threat), and the resources that go into replacing those assets, plus their losses, will eat up resources that could go into the Pacific. Sending shells to Ukraine is going to cut down on our available R&D. It's really not accurate to frame it as us giving them outdated old junk that would have fallen apart anyway, they got some pretty high-end stuff, and this commitment depleted important reserves of the conventional arsenal.
To be clear, putting a stop to Russia's antics is not bad foreign policy, but the part I find frustrating is that I don't think this should be America's responsibility to this extent. The EU constantly goes on about how strong and independent it is, so Ukraine shouldn't even be Trump's ship to sink. But it somehow falls upon America to disentangle a conflict we have little to do with, suddenly everyone is demanding us to be world police.
there342
4d ago
I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.
I thought this too at first, but let's be honest. It's really, really difficult to reason one's way into socialism, and that says all there is to say about the prospects of reasoning them out of it by adding one more stone to the mountain of its failures. We are not half a century from the collapse of the USSR and yet its example is not a factor in any of the socialist's consideration. Every failure can be decried as either not real communism or a result of treacherous interference from outside influences - we'll succeed if only we conquer those, too. I really don't think a bad example will teach anyone a lesson on this kind of thing. All they hear is "Free public transit" and they think "That sounds so cool!" without the slightest consideration of where the money comes from.
there342
4d ago
I didn't read you as a socialist, I understood that you said you weren't a fan and all, but that was what I was getting at - Zohran seems like something you'd find more concerning than your comment seemed to indicate given your stated preferences
I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.
The entire mission of this belief system seems to be dispensing with personal accountability at any cost, rewarding people for giving nothing, and deluding the masses into thinking they can get every possible thing for free. There is no interest in a platform like Zohran's in rewarding people for being virtuous, for working hard or providing things of value, only in redistributing to those who do less of either. Personal accountability is often a dirty term from this perspective, and this sort of belief system explicitly seeks to use political solutions to fix every possible issue, whether it's empowering schools over parents, giving us government-run grocery stores, or censoring for the good of the masses.
there342
2mo ago
I meant if the US was involved in a war of this nature, sorry that I wasn't clear. The US radically altered its aviation plans in response to Ukraine, canceling their planned scout helicopter (which didn't have a lot of the advantages the more expensive Comanche would have) because of how survivable modern helicopters look. A war with the kind of air defense Russia has would be really bloody for Army Aviation and the Comanche probably would have given them an edge they don't have currently, and it's a perfect example of a project that was canceled for the war on terror, in which Army aviation was pushed to the breaking point and had to devote everything they could to keeping the old stuff they had running.
there342
2mo ago
Border crossings have decreased a lot. People don't necessarily apply number crunching logic to these things. If a big scary fascist man says he's going to deport them and make a tiktok video ridiculing them, that's a more effective deterrent than his predecessor who didn't really object to their presence while enabling a chain of NGOs to coach everybody into making it in guaranteed for free. People react to visceral fears a lot more strongly than they get credit for, rational or not.
there342
2mo ago
Yup - projects like the Comanche are revealing, I think. I'm no expert, but I'd figure that such a weapon could have been a highly useful and survivable platform in a Ukraine scenario compared to a new generation of Apache with some new gizmos attached, but the Army needed to allocate resources to getting a ton of mine-resistant trucks, not a sci-fi stealth helicopter. And those trucks probably won't be that useful in a war full of missiles, drones, and artillery - hence those MRAPs just got sold to police departments. Huge waste to high-end acquisitions.
there342
3mo ago
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.
Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.
there342
4mo ago
It was also an effort to recognize causes that weren't from direct combat. For instance, your wingman getting in an accident that kills him can be as traumatic of an event as seeing him get blown up by enemy fire, and both can be traumatic even if you didn't get blood and guts or debris all over you as you'd expect from a name like shell shock. Shell shock was named when they thought it was a literal physical reaction to the concussive force of artillery barrages, battle fatigue came about as the realization that it was psychological set in, and PTSD was a more generalized descriptor not exclusive to battle.
there342
4mo ago
Were it people who grudgingly showed up to because they had to because their masters made them on behalf of promises none of them were alive for, it would have been lesser, maybe even worse than if they had not at all.
Funnily enough, the movies' interpretation of events is basically that. They added a scene in Helm's Deep where elves show up and say, "Idk, we were allied thousands of years or so or something, so we'll stick around and help out ig." Basically, completely distorting Tolkien's intentions with what Alliances represented (to say nothing of the relevance of elves in the war by that point).
there342
4mo ago
You might be onto something, but I think it's less about dogs specifically and more the issue of human faces. I'm a furry autist and while absolutely not face-blind, there's something about the human face that is just a tad off-putting to me. Not to say I'm disgusted by it or anything, but recognizing a face as "a guy" always makes whatever it's attached to look a little bit worse in my mind. Just a little. Even when a character is clearly human, I always like them more when they have their face obscured by a helmet or something. But having a dog head instead works too.
This comment is just the inverse of all the redditors calling him a nazi. Shame on you.
If redditors are accusing someone of being an awful RIGHT WING NAZI, and motteposters (let's face it, this place is very, very red tribe-bent) are accusing him of being an awful GAY HOMOSEXUAL LEFTIST (btw, what happened to not fighting the culture war, eh?), he probably is indeed somewhere central to those positions.
there342
5mo ago
If army helicopter pilots can't be sent to conduct routine flights in common use air corridors, what makes you think they can go to war? Training flight doesn't mean these guys were fresh out of flight school, it's something all pilots need to do to maintain their standards, and the military has plenty of legitimate reasons to operate in places like DC that they need to be ready for.
The alternative, where no one ever flies unless safety can be abundantly guaranteed, is that military pilots never get a chance to fly.
DC airspace is widely regarded as a mess from what I hear. The problem isn't that the army sends people to get flight hours in places with airports (every metropolitan area)
there342
5mo ago
They were probably too high, but I'd discourage the take that it was severe negligence on their part alone. DC airspace is a nightmare. It was an accident waiting to happen because of the incredibly dense traffic, and they likely had no way of seeing the threat from their position. The helicopter was warned about a plane and most likely was fixated on another one ahead of them. They were also wearing NVGs which can be a detriment in this kind of scenario
there342
6mo ago
I think it's troll op as in troll operation (soft sciences are one big troll op), similar to your typical rdrama stunts.
I think the principle cause of the difference in behavior in the two linked posts is simply that reddit has a strange fixation on the idea that underage drug use and sex is okay. Not merely that punishing kids for those things can go too far, but that these behaviors are always a good thing that isn't any of a parent's business, ever, and it's weird that any parent would make a big deal of it at all. They don't think these are bad things, period. They will claim that any effort to monitor this behavior is an intrusion on the kids' lives, which can only harm their development.
By contrast, they do have reservations towards political youtubers, at least, those of a persuasion they disagree with. And so, any heavy-handed intrusion on kids' lives is not only justifiable, but mandatory. It's a case of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" but applied to parenting. The only difference in the two behaviors is that they think one thing is bad and not the other, everything else was thought of in light of that consideration.
there342
7mo ago
If you're at the point of freeing all your nation's prisoners to stir up trouble and keep the heat off yourself, I have to wonder if you're still the one defending the nation or just what it needs defending from.
there342
8mo ago
And yet the ATF is not breaking into the houses of children with glock switches.
there342
8mo ago
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict.
And this is why there's always a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Palestinians might have very good reasons to go to war, but they also break the rules of war seemingly as a hobby.
The question of what makes a terrorist isn't whether they're right to start a war, it's how they conduct themselves in one. Palestine has been breaking pretty much every rule, at every opportunity. Fighting from sanctuaries, fighting without identifiable uniforms, attacking targets with mass civilian casualties being the entire strategic point.
There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
No, but there are clauses for unlawful combatants, which "terrorist" is a normie-comprehensible shorthand propaganda term for. Palestine fights its fights via unlawful combatants all the time. And unlawful combatants have very little in the way of protections, because they undermine everything else in the rules of war.
there342
8mo ago
Is it not the 'common sense', dominant narrative in the US that the 2000's were a mistake born out of lies and a hysteria?
Maybe? Terrorist is obviously something of a rhetorical term, but not many people view the war in Afghanistan that way anyway, and I don't think many came away with the impression that there were not actually terrorists involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
there342
8mo ago
Agree with this entirely. AI is going to lead to a new inundation of total slop. My positive-to-neutral attitude shifted to slight hostility (though still feeling that a lot of the complaining is pure entitlement) when I saw printouts of shitty AI art at a county fair that some teenager cobbled together in a presentation. I would have respected childish crayon drawings more.
there342
9mo ago
Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?
there342
10mo ago
can you show me examples of JD Vance being an effective speaker? I'm not doubting you but I want to see this.
there342
11mo ago
Very common line of thinking for that shade of political thought, I think. It's a recurring issue.
If we just called them unhoused instead of homeless, the stigma would be gone and everything would be better. If we just call them neurodivergent instead of mentally ill/challenged, the erasure of the stigma will mitigate the issue. And be sure to call "slaves" "enslaved people" instead. None of these initiatives actually really improved anything as far as I can tell, but at least they function as shibboleths.
This is called autism, not Jewishness. Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do and trying to make sense of them in arcane ways that take them overly literally.
More options
Context Copy link