Shrike
17hr ago
- Never listened to this podcast.
- Don't have a strong opinion as to what will happen in the next year or two. Widening the conflict they haven't been able to win yet would certainly be a move for Russia, and so there are strong reasons to think it is doubtful, but I'm not sure it's impossible.
- I assume the nuclear weapons being discussed are tactical, as part of an "escalate to deescalate" doctrine, with the idea being that Russia would use "small" nuclear weapons, probably after an initial military action, to say "back off" - with the idea being that NATO would be unwilling to retaliate with nuclear weapons of their own, lest the conflict crawl up the escalation cycle to "real" nuclear weapons.
IF Russia finds itself in a shooting war with NATO (regardless of who initiates it), I consider an "escalate to deescalate" scenario plausible. Russia has (by some estimates) a 10:1 advantage over NATO in substrategic nuclear weapons in the European theater. Many of these weapons are very small, deployed from artillery pieces or even air-to-air missiles.
I would stress that tactical nuclear weapons are very, very different from strategic nuclear weapons, and during the Cold War both sides would likely have used nuclear weapons "routinely" as substrategic weapons (for instance nuclear depth charges were intended to destroy an enemy submarine, not necessarily the entire Russian Baltic Fleet, or what have you). Generally speaking, the effects of these weapons would be along the lines of "destroy an airbase" not "obliterate Berlin." However, the current gap in NATO/Russian tactical nuclear capabilities is important because it limits the ability to play tit-for-tat if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons, either as part of an escalate-to-deescalate gambit or simply because they are effective. If you've got 10 tactical nuclear weapons for every 1 of theirs, they are going to run out of tactical nuclear weapons long before you do. So once you've both nuked each other a few times and they run out, they have two options: accept you nuking them routinely (which greatly enhances the effectiveness of your weapons systems) or escalate to strategic nuclear weapons, with the larger stakes and (literal) fallout that entails.
Now, modern nuclear weapons are smaller and often have "dial a yield" capabilities that makes the lines a bit blurrier than that, but hopefully that gives you a good idea of why people might believe Russia would resort to nuclear weapons: militarily, nuclear weapons are very effective, even if they are "small." Politically, if you have the upper hand and the deeper stockpiles, you have good reason to believe that you can extract concessions from a foe who will be unwilling to race you up the escalation ladder to tossing ICBMs at each other.
Right, if your goal is to boost TFR based on historically effective methods, the end state you'll be reaching for looks like "boost young marriage" and the lever you'll be reaching for to make that happen looks like "make seduction and breach of promise torts great again" and the like.
Shrike
23hr ago
I also suspect that the steady decline in the hazards both of the journey and the destination have resulted in each wave of immigrants being successively less "pre-filtered" for what you might call "American temperament" than prior waves.
Shrike
23hr ago
We lack it, and since it's in our DNA to lack it, it can't be fixed.
Setting aside the questions of whether WIERD characteristics are genetically heritable, either WEIRD types have lacked it in the past, in which case it is quite adaptive in an extremely tribalistic environment, or WEIRD types (at least, in the United States) still have it today. There's no plausible mechanism by which it would have been bred out of the population in just a few generations without an extraordinarily efficient suppression of breeding (such as genocide) and no such mechanism has been observed.
Shrike
4d ago
the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince
And I suspect this arrangement was pretty adaptive to a lot of the pressures of the time. Protestantism is a very literate and democratic religion, culturally - while a church could hold its doctrines without literacy, I think the counterfactual for "the West but with Protestant doctrine" is likely the Eastern Orthodox moreso than the Southern Baptist Convention, or what have you.
Shrike
5d ago
And Morlock's not even a crusader-PFP-tradcatholicism-is-my-identity type, from what I can tell. N=vibes but I get the sense that some form of integralism is pretty popular in those corners despite being (at least in the more hardcore varieties) contrary to church teaching and potentially even doctrine in 2026.
Shrike
5d ago
I don't think theological liberalisation or even a loss of faith among Protestants necessarily entails a decay into centralised power.
No, you're mistaking me: I am saying Mainline Protestants had a lot of power in America for a long time, but theological liberalization split them and the (conservative) splitters by default didn't have institutional control. Here, this comment explains more of what I am getting at.
if anything, I'd say libertarianism is the more fundamental ideology that was hallucinated into existence as a way of dealing with religious fracture.
Libertarianism is famously hard to define but the traits that are shared by libertarian-leaning Americans predate the fundamentalist-mainline split.
I wouldn't say things like homesteading, having solar panels, raising cattle, hosting your own git server, self-custody of your Bitcoin, etc., have any particular rooting in Protestant theology itself
WELL THIS IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION and what I would say is that the theology and culture are all caught up together. To grossly simplify things, there's a good argument to be had that the libertarian tendency in the United States is in no small part downstream of the British Isles and specifically the borderers. Now, Christianity in the Isles were always distinct from the mainland. Check in on the Scottish clergy and you'll find them doing things like "illegally seating an excommunicated guy as king." It's not particularly surprising that if you check in on them a bit later you find that their theology is, if not "libertarian," skeptical of tyranny and ("papish") centralized authority. I think the culture and theology accelerated each other; necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
As for whether theological liberalism resulted in a loss of power, I mean, kind of? But the Jews who are actually in power are not the sort who take the Torah particularly seriously.
- I didn't say anything about the Jews, I am only talking about Protestant Christians
- I am not arguing that theological liberalism inherently leads to a loss of power. I am saying it split Christianity in the States.
And the Catholics in power today... well, as has been questioned on this very forum: "Is the pope Catholic?"
Power is downstream of institution-building. I have had an unusually high amount of exposure to institutions of both Protestant and Catholic origin and I have every respect for Catholic institution building. They are very smart, very serious, and their approach to the world helps them avoid some pitfalls that Protestants often fall into, in my opinion. Protestants are extremely likely to want their organizations to be a fully confessional community, which has serious advantages but cuts Protestant entities off from the talent of other faith groups. This is easiest to see in their universities: Catholic institutions are typically quite happy to hire talented professors and staff of all or no faith, while conservative Protestant schools often restrict staff to those who share their faith. This has real benefits but narrows their talent pool, sometimes fairly dramatically.
Shrike
5d ago
I mean, do they? Are the Twitter Tradcath Brigade staunch religious liberty advocates and fans of Dignitatis humanae?
Shrike
5d ago
Yes, I think conservative Protestants were likely under pressure from three different directions
- that they were getting outflanked in the institutions
- the institutions were genuinely doing stuff that was inimical to their culture and beliefs and in some cases also really bad
- there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of
For all of these reasons, chunking the ring into Mount Doom instead of trying to continue to wield it began to look increasingly attractive. I think the degree to which Protestants actually bailed out of institutional competitiveness is likely overstated, but I wouldn't say it's not real.
Shrike
5d ago
Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions
I think that this is downstream of the grievous damage that Mainstream Protestantism did to itself and the United States when it started dabbling in theological liberalism. Since mainstream Protestants controlled the institutions, their liberalization kicked off a withdrawal by theologically conservative Protestants. The conservatives ended up with the numbers and zeal, but didn't inherit the institutional capacity (although they have been working to build it back up).
To American Protestants, the dream is to be self-sovereign and free not merely from control by the centralised state, but free even from dependency on it in the first place
I am pretty libertarian and so sympathetic to this desire, so I'd interrogate to what degree this is actually a problem. But I definitely don't think it's inherent to Protestantism (and fwiw you see much less of this sort of thinking, from what I can tell, among the Reformed Protestants).
Shrike
5d ago
The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.
And this is a newer position of the Catholic church, too. St. Augustine very specifically says that the church councils can err (contrasting their fallibility with that of Scripture); even the Catholic church admits that the pope's authority was not something that was universally acknowledged or understood in the early church, but rather "gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was successor of Peter, the first of the apostles" and papal infallibility was only defined dogmatically in 1870 or so.
Shrike
5d ago
I've never understood this specific type of Catholic triumphalism. Not only did the Catholic church pretty much entirely fail to conserve early Christian culture, or the universal church (where Western insistence on changing the Nicene Creed drove a split with the East), or pre-Reformation Catholic culture, or European monarchy (and attempts were made!) it also fails to convey its own teachings to its own members. The supposed authority of the Church yields a Catholic lay culture that is poorly catechized and where the overwhelming majority of weekly churchgoers oppose the church's own teachings. This might be a tolerable situation if the church was trading off quality for quantity, but (at least in the US) the opposite is happening: Catholicism is shrinking.
I highly recommend reading Barna or other pollsters on these sorts of things. The first thing that you realize when you start to look at the numbers is that Christians really need to be better catechized. The second thing you realize is that the denominations that, stereotypically, don't know what the word "catechism" means are doing a better job at it than Catholics (somehow).
Shrike
6d ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than this, at least for Founding-era Americans: plenty of people didn't like Catholics and public schools at the time in most places (where they had been established) were probably going to give you generic Protestantism as a baseline, but at the federal level there was pretty clearly an interest in making sure Catholics (which were a substantial minority - recall Maryland was set up as a Catholic refugee colony) were able to serve in federal office and were not persecuted by the federal government.
Shrike
6d ago
The New Testament condemns sexual activity outside of marriage, mistreating slaves, and deviant sexual practices. It doesn't say something like "sex slaves are banned" because the things it explicitly enjoins rules out sex slavery. (True, I suppose a first century Christian could buy a sex slave and...treat them in a chaste and kind manner, but at that point I'd say they were a former sex slave.)
It's as if I said "I think using force to harm other people outside of the due process of law is wrong" and you said "you'll notice that Shrike never condemns murder."
The fact that we're having to go over the basic sexual ethics of the largest religion on earth instead of arguing about anything Marx said is frankly a better refutation of your argument than anything I've said here. (Although I will say that it's making me want to suggest the Didache should be on a school reading list rather than anything that's technically from Scripture.)
Shrike
6d ago
Furthermore, there's nothing in the bible about not having sex slaves, not buying sex slaves! [...] That's just in the New Testament.
The New Testament is a pretty important part of the Bible, yes.
Shrike
7d ago
it doesn't teach you about what actually happens, about real behaviour in the West.
The values most people act on, including woke people, Marxists, and a/antitheists, are downstream of Christianity and the Bible. If you came back to the West after being gone for a few millennia, the questions you would ask (besides "what's a cell phone?" and "does anyone have a Latin-English translator?") would be things like "wait, why can't I buy a sex slave at Wal-mart?"
And the answer to that has nothing to do with cell phones.
That is not happening today! Nobody is waging war for Christianity in a Western country.
It's 2026, the weapons of war are a laptop and a Westlaw subscription.
Shrike
7d ago
Quantity is its own quality, as is known.
This I do agree with.
turned out trivial today
You're more confident in this than I am, which is interesting.
I am not sure the US has even retained its peak capabilities in mine-sweeping, but we'll see.
The US put ships through despite recent reports of mines being deployed, which tells you something. How much, I am not sure.
Shrike
7d ago
Are you for real. Their aircraft from 1986 is destroyed.
My sentence is expressing the fact that their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 1986. It has nothing to do with whether their aircraft from '86 are still surviving or not. In a Strait scenario, a Shahed is not really qualitatively superior at destroying ships than the smart weapons technology Iran had purchased from the US during the Cold War, including strike fighters with precision-guided weapons and radar-guided anti-ship missiles.
The main advantage, I think, is quantitative: they have a lot of Shaheds, which are cheap and simple to operate.
Or do you think there was an expectation that as soon as the US fails to topple Iran by killing some dudes, we'll enter this morass with strait blockade?
While I think the exact degree to which they would be able to achieve this against US defenses was murky pre-war, I definitely do not think that US defense planners did not anticipate the possibility or fail to correctly assess that Iran had the ability to threaten strait traffic. The US government gambling that Iran wouldn't rather than that Iran couldn't seems much more likely to me.
(And again, Iran's actual capability to "close the strait" has been demonstrated to be marginal, so if the US Navy warplanners assessed that they would be able to clear the strait and escort ships through in the face of Iranian defenses, they were probably correct for a certain degree of risk - it would not surprise me if the Pentagon got the capability assessment of Iran more or less right but fumbled or failed to consider as outside of their area of competency the question of what degree of risk would be acceptable to the civilian market.)
I highly recommend reading up on some of the US Navy's problems with Iranian and Iraqi mines in the area to get an idea of the background and mindset the US military would be going into this with. The Iraqis laid a big minefield in the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and successfully hit a cruiser and an amphibious assault ship (basically, a pocket carrier). Those are essentially next-bests if you can't actually hit a real aircraft carrier.
On a quick Google, initial mineclearing operations in the Persian Gulf took nearly two months to clear lanes for shipping and mopping up took the better part of a year after the war concluded. So that gives you an idea of "how long will it take to clear the strait of mines" baseline the Pentagon would be operating from (although I suspect they have fancier tech now).
Shrike
7d ago
Their control right now is qualitatively different, they can flexibly threaten ships, do it on and off, and importantly even while the USN is around and the country is getting bombed.
Iran's ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 1986. If anything it is quantitatively different.
From your own link
(The point of this link was to reference the fact that Iran has been kicking around the idea of tolling the strait for years).
And I agree with Smith that they didn't know it would, and indeed thought it wouldn't.
Why would you think this? The fact that Iran could substantially disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been known and discussed and acknowledged publicly for decades.
Shrike
7d ago
Are any of those media Christian beyond that?
Although the Project Hail Mary title is a play on words, the movie itself takes the time for a pretty on the nose and fairly-needless-to-the-plot discussion about belief in God, which I would say is far from a shallow reference.
Mainstream Hollywood films with a fairly overtly Christian message aren't actually all that rare (see Unbroken, Silence, Hacksaw Ridge, etc.) and for every one of those there are two that take Christian ideas seriously, even if it's in more subtle ways. I was recently watching the Fallout show and one of the characters reaches for the Golden Rule, not as part of a come-to-Jesus sideplot, but because it's an important moral principle - obviously not one unique to Christianity, of course.
Shrike
8d ago
I tend to agree with Noah Smith of all people that "Before the war, Iran didn’t control the strait, simply because it didn’t realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn’t know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting down the strait."
Well, Noah Smith (at least judging by this paragraph) is wrong to frankly an almost unbelievable degree. Iran has been aware that they could threaten to close the strait since the 1980s (at least), because you don't need drones to do that when you have mines. There was a major flare up where they specifically threatened to do so during the Obama administration. And they have been kicking the idea around of tolling the strait seriously since 2019 (at least).
That the US saw it fit to sign on to this shows that the US is really weary of the war and willing to end it on net unfavorable terms.
I think if the US was really desperate to end the war we wouldn't keep striking Iran.
I think reality is actually more complicated than that. There's reason to believe that the North America that the European explorers saw was essentially a postapocalyptic wasteland. There's good archeological evidence there were very sophisticated societies in North America (as there were in South America when Cortez arrived) that had collapsed – Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.
Now, I tend to agree with you that these nations likely would not have been as great as the United States if they had not collapsed or been overrun, but this is for moral reasons as much as any other: the Cahokians, like the Aztecs, appear to have practiced human sacrifice. As simple as it is to say that being "too stupid to have invented guns," is slightly more important than whether or not you practice human sacrifice, I tend to think that European success (including in the sciences) was due in no small part to their religious outlook, which was upstream of their culture, which in turn produced the scientific method.
TLDR; American Lore is even cooler and more hardcore than you were taught in school (and if you ever get a chance to go to a North American mound, I highly recommend it).
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