Shrike
4hr ago
precisely zero people before the invasion would describe it as the hardest target in Europe.
Go look at its on-paper force numbers in 2020 and compare it with other European numbers. Ukraine did not necessarily have the latest and greatest (although they had more of that after Russia seized Crimea) but they had an absolutely gigantic inherited Russian ground force. I think they probably could have beaten any other single European power in a conventional war.
Russia is very much actively demonstrating it's ineptitude against a nation many believed it could topple in weeks.
But Russia is doing better in Ukraine than the US is doing in Afghanistan. And since Afghanistan is less powerful than Ukraine, so Russia is more powerful than the US.
Or perhaps the fact that Russia derped up in Ukraine (which, again, is not fighting Russia by itself, but rather with the direct support the EU and US!) has little bearing on whether or not Russia became more militarily capable since the end of the Cold War (they have) and does not predict whether or not they might increase in power in the future, NATO's Top Guy warned a couple of years ago. (This wouldn't be unusual, militaries typically become more powerful in wartime, not less.)
If China found itself in a similar scenarios attempting to invade Taiwan then I'd be comfortable declaring the united states an unambiguous unipolar hegemon for the foreseeable future.
But they have not, so the US is not an unambiguous unipolar hegemon.
(Also, we might expect that a Chinese failure in Taiwan could be even more disastrous for the Chinese military than Putin's excursion into Ukraine, just because ships are a lot more expensive, time-consuming, and finicky to build than tanks and China will likely lose them at unsustainable rates if they lose a war with Taiwan. Whereas Russia can replace tanks pretty easily. This is part of why Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian ships and strategic aircraft is so noteworthy.)
Ok, so we spend less money... This is bad?
You asked me where the US military went, I answered your question.
We certainly saved money in the short term. Now we're having to pay to build out a lot of that production capability again, and we're having a difficult time doing so. I think it's possible that small investments upstream might have paid off in the long run. Just as one example, the tooling to make the F-22 was destroyed after the production line ended. The manufacturers aren't just going to keep stuff sitting around (where they have to pay for it). Perhaps spending more on munitions and capability expansion and maintenance upstream would have led to long-term savings, I don't know. Given the good 20-year gap between now and the end of the Cold War, probably not. On the other hand, we may yet have reason to regret trying to save. Who can say?
I do know that the US military and defense industrial base shrunk after the end of the Cold War.
I guess just like, could you show me some reason to believe anxiety about whether we can reign china in around the region near them is super salient to the American voter?
The American voter does not like it when price go up. They also do not like it when Made In China. (The American voter contains multitudes.) American voters like computers. Computers use chips. Many chips made in Taiwan. China take Taiwan, price go up AND made in China. Not good!
I agree with you that the average American voter doesn't really think about China very much, though, and often wants less overseas intervention. But overseas intervention doesn't mean being weak. Your average American probably thinks "talk softly and carry a big stick." And moreover, an actual full-blown war in the Pacific would lead to all sorts of supply chain insanity, and so even if Americans don't realize they care about that (and lots more of them do realize, after COVID), they wouldn't.
Sure, if their mismanagement is key.
Well, do you want to discuss that? Like, did you actually disagree with my lil "here are the Top Five Bad Things that happened in the US after 1990 and they were mostly elite mismanagement" list? I learn all sorts of things from people disagreeing with me, don't hold back. I'd be delighted to learn the actual worst thing that happened was onion deregulation which was pushed by a coalition of left-right populists in 1998. But unless you give me reasons to believe something like that, I'm gonna keep pointing back to failing to prevent 9/11 despite that being entirely possible as "key mismanagement."
But on the first recession it would be foolish to vote in the guy who predicted 86 of the last 2 recession.
I've been pretty consistently saying "you are right to be wary of populists." I am not endorsing voting for Alex Jones just because they were turning the frogs gay, or something.
If you put the average occupy wallstreet fellow in charge of anything related to banking we'd still be in a recession today
I would be very unsurprised to learn that lots of people (particularly in NYC) in the banking sector were OWS types. But you're arguing against a position I am not endorsing.
Only when you collect the greatest hits and in a whigg history manner ignore all the incredible failures can you even come close to crediting them with foresight.
In this manner they are no different from the gatekeepers.
Populist politicians are more prone than even normal politicians to sociopathy. As a role their job is basically to represent their constituents and thus a smart populist politician, knowing their constituents are half retarded conspiracy theorists, must be on the extreme edge of cynical to properly appeal to them.
I mean, I see where you are coming from on Vance, but this model of the world seems to me to be values-inverted populism.
Shrike
4hr ago
I'd appreciate if you actually provided hard proof of this but I'll take your word for it.
Well, I don't have hard proof but if you followed the link it would have pointed you in the direction of evidence. Here's the TWZ write-up: https://www.twz.com/news-features/is-the-u-s-dropping-anti-tank-mines-to-stop-iranian-missile-launchers
and then lost six more in the subsequent rescue mission.
Yeah, because the US decided to try Eagle Claw again, and Iran's air defenses were so leaky that SOCCOM (presumably sharing Kel-tec's stash at this point) correctly assessed that they could move a pair of slow C-130s nearly 100 miles inland without Iranian air defenses doing anything about it.
The public understanding is that the F-15E was hit by a MANPADS, which generally cannot reach jets flying at their service ceiling. Given that the A-10 made it all the way out of Iran before the pilot had to punch out, and that the F-35 likewise made it back (so technically, 2 shoot-downs for Iran, worse than Iraqi performance for the first three days of ODS) my guess is that small missiles, possibly MANPADS, were being used here as well, although airplanes can be pretty darn tough.
And remember the footage of that Hornet dodging a small missile (because it had been strafing an Iranian coastal area)? That looked like a MANPADS, too. And that was on March 25, at which point the Navy had allegedly been doing this for weeks.
Which suggests to me that the Iranian area air-defense network was pretty much gone by then.
If my story is true then it makes perfect sense that Trump immediately cut his losses and has been desperately searching for an offramp whereas if your story is true then it makes no sense whatsoever that Trump agreed to a ceasefire instead of escalating the bombing.
My theory is something like "the US wiped out a lot of Iran's major force assets and they just...didn't surrender, which 'wasn't supposed to happen.'" Your options at this point are:
- Keep flying a trillion missions indefinitely to blow up technicals or whatever and try to find the remaining big ticket assets (and yeah now you're putting yourself at increased risk from MANPADS) and hope that this somehow works where big ticket items like "sink navy, ground air force" don't.
- Ground invasion
- Peace
I think that's a perfectly cromulent explanation for what happens next.
I am not saying, by the way, that losing a couple of aircraft wasn't an Event, and it's quite possible that that had a tremendous influence on Trump's decision making process. But "we hit a single aircraft by luck, camped the location, and tagged another" is a perfectly good accounting of that event that is congruent with Iran's IADS being mostly suppressed and them relying largely on MANPADS and other small, portable IR systems (as you described) for defense at this point.
Shrike
16hr ago
Are you accounting for the sortie rate?
My link is by sortie rate, yes.
the Karaj bridge was hit on April 2nd, suggesting that's around the time the USAF began actually penetrating Iranian airspace to drop bombs.
No, we have good reason to believe that they (or possibly IDF) aircraft were doing it on March 26 (this is ignoring that the US flew B-2s and a ton of escorts deep inside Iran to hit Fordow in the summer of 2025) because of the complaints about the mines in Shiraz.
Again, within the week.
Just outside of the week, if you toll from the 26th as a minimum start date for penetration bombing. Much longer than that, if you toll from March 4.
If Iran's air defenses were really as weak as you seem to think
Either Iran's air defenses are pretty bad (they hit all of three manned aircraft - for reference, the Iraqis got three manned aircraft on the opening day of Desert Storm, and the day after that, and the day after that, too) or US ISR is so good that it just routes US aircraft around them nearly infallibly. (Or your theory is true and all the photos of aircraft with JDAMS on DIVIDS are just for show.) It wouldn't really surprise me if US ISR (and ability to communicate it to forces in theatre) has improved considerably since ODS and that is playing a large role here.
no reason to waste so many JASSMs and other expensive standoff munitions
Well, keep in mind that military planners like to use test out their equipment in live conditions and should always be expected to fire a certain number of munitions for fun just to make sure they work.
Shrike
1d ago
I agree with a lot of what you are saying directionally, but
entities operate out of greed
entities don't have greed, individuals do. Which is why low margins by themselves are a poor indicator of whether or not greed is at play. If I am the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart and MonopolyMart posts a five-figure net loss in FY2024 but I, the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart, have a salary of $1 billion, does the low margin indicate that I am not in the business for the money?
We know what happens when the measure is the target.
when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that.
In the US, people without insurance can typically get discounted rates if they pay out of pocket and/or charitable care if they have trouble paying at all. To your point about supply and demand, insurance drives aggregate medical costs up because your total payment for medical care (which includes your health insurance coverage) has to cover overhead and payroll for doctors and insurers.
Shrike
2d ago
I don't know how with a straight face you can say it's not just China after Russia's performance and the performance of other recent adversaries.
I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
multi-polarity was the the norm for all but like 20 years.
Sure.
Where exactly did it go?
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
And you know who we were worried about racing in technology? Japan.
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I really don't think the American populist feeling of decline hinges on whether a Chinese person can buy more rice than their gdp per capita might naively predict. I don't think people have a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
The status quo is of course going to catch strays for everything that goes wrong.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
whether actually our democracy was already dissolved by the democrats cheating
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
The statistical evidence that they're wrong is ignored
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
I don't know about this gloss! The printing press favored pamphlets. Rhetoric was as important as it is today on social media.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
The major change with the social media age is that gate keepers and distribution is now gone, the memetic evolution chamber is now global and fast where previous iterations had locality
I agree with this.
I think the globalization of everything will be the ultimate legacy of social media.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
Certainly there are things worth worrying about.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
But I don't push it with conspiracy theories and unfounded accusations that people who disagree with me as demonic pedophiles.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
Vance is a cynical actor....he's a politician, as far as I'm concerned he's a sociopath.
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
Shrike
2d ago
The last time the USAF tried switching from using stand-off munitions to dumb bombs
Is there any evidence that the USAF used dumb bombs at all?
The go-to bomb is JDAM, which is a guided bomb with maximum ranges in the double-digit miles - not considered a standoff weapon, but not a "dumb bomb" either. The JDAM-ER triples the range, making it arguably a standoff weapon.
I am also skeptical of your broader claim. Overall, Iranian air defenses likely performed worse than Iraq's in Desert Storm against manned aircraft.
In terms of a concrete timeline, Hegseth said that the US was switching to bombs on March 4, 2026. There's at least evidence of mines dropped in Shiraz dated to March 26, the US bombed the Karaj bridge with a JDAM on April 2, indicating strikes by bombs against targets far inland by that point at a minimum. Iran hit one F-35 on March 19 and 1 F-15E and 1 A-10 (doing CSAR for the F-15) on April 3. A ceasefire was declared on April 7, but on April 5 (the same day the WSO was recovered) Iranians are said to have reported a number of aircraft overflights, including over Isfahan and Alborz - hardly exterior provinces.
And as far as MQ-9s go, by my count the US lost (to ground fire) 16 Reapers in March (12 of them by the 19th), 8 in April, 3 in May, 2 in June, 5 in July.
I don't think that this data (which I am eyeballing, so welcome for any corrections) necessarily excludes the narrative you put forward, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto it. There's no real indication that the US slowed down after the F-35 was tagged on the 19th and there's evidence of a surge on the 5th, after the F-15E and A-10 were shot down.
Shrike
2d ago
Nearly 100% of ATACMS and PrSM
My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
Shrike
2d ago
Maybe it was flying in rare Beanie Babies.
Would be almost as hysterical if they flew a plane out there transporting a piece of paper with the number of a checking account on it though.
Shrike
2d ago
If we're just talking military strength then it's much more debatable and the whole story is China. Ukraine isn't really a sign of a decline in super power status Russia has been meddling in and doing military actions in non-allied nations this whole time and if anything their failure in Ukraine shows that they are not a peer nation.
I think it's pretty clear, and it's not just China. Russia's military declined significantly in the 1990s (although 1990 was not its nadir, as I understand it) before a remodernization program under Putin. As far as China, a single US carrier battle group could probably have won a war against China in 1990. Does anyone think that is true today?
I agree that being a superpower has constraints, no doubt about it. But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.
it's my position that if you're talking about a declining united states I don't really think people's complaints are that in a hypothetical pacific theater China is marginally more able to push its weight around
I don't think this is true. Any time anyone is speaking of the need to race China or deal with China on AI, they are paying homage (however unwitting) to relative US decline. Nobody in the 1990s was worried about racing China in software development.
I was mainly speaking economically...US Share of world GDP has been flat
Unless you adjust for PPP, in which case it goes down 10 percentage points.
it's sufficient to show that smoke does not always mean fire.
Sure, except that I listed a lot of bad decisions made by (I think it is relatively fair to say) the forces of stability, and you haven't presented either an alternative list or contested my list of bad decisions. This inclines me to think that the populists are at least partially right in their criticisms (which in my opinion implies nothing about their ability to properly govern).
I generally agree with all of your points about the narrative, about dooming as an excuse to avoid action, all of that stuff. But psychoanalyzing your ideological foes is also a (very seductive) form of doing this.
You mentioned social media and that's also certainly a factor. Communications technology is another of the classic preludes to revolution and also often correlates with improvements rather than a decline.
Yes, I think it's quite possible that this is exactly what we are seeing. What I find uncomfortable, though, is what the communications technology is pushing us towards - because it seems, to me, to be very unclear. The printing press pushed us towards clear, logical, ideological thinking - Protestantism, Marxism, the like. Radio and TV may have helped older interpersonal qualities return to the surface, but never really eclipsed the book or essay. But it seems to me the shape of Tik-Tok, AI slop and X posts is still uncertain. The old ideologies are still fighting, using the newer media as a skinsuit. Certainly I expect religious traditions to persist, but politically I feel like this far on we deserve something more interesting than unironic Marxism. So far, though, it seems like new media is better at critique than articulating a positive vision. So if communications technology is shaking up our hybrid book-TV world, what's going to emerge from that shakeup? I don't know, but I am very curious as to your take on this, now or as a topline post at some point.
Could there be more proof of a this being a timeless trope?
Doomers are certainly a timeless trope. But doom and decline also come. Doomers are overfitting, not hallucinating ex nihilo.
I agree things are more complicated but that's broadly my point. We need to actually have a sober discussion about which policies are good and which are bad and seriously consider the trade offs and downstream impacts. Populists are not capable of this, they default to conspiracy theories of elites who inexplicably want the decline.
I think it's more complicated than this, even. For instance, Vance is in the populist wing of the populist wing of the populist party, and I think he's a Motte lurker quite capable of this.
Shrike
3d ago
There is some argument I'm receptive to on protectionism in targeted cases but it's generally the case that we benefit from trade.
I didn't say "trade bad." I said "the US had unambiguously declined relative to other countries as a superpower" which is largely a measure of relative military strength. Trade is actually pretty good for maintaining military strength in many ways.
This just seems like catch up economics, and in a way that mostly makes us better off.
I don't think this is entirely correct - the US made deliberate policy choices regarding China (including the transfer of military and dual-use technology) that got us to where we are today. But assume that the impact of that was negligible. It could be the case that due to catch up economics the US is in relative decline.
And I don't think it makes the US mostly better off not to be the only superpower. The US is not better off because of the war in Ukraine. It is not better off because it needs to maintain parity with China in the Pacific. Those situations make the US worse off. There's an argument that the US is still on net better off because of cheap Chinese labor, but I am skeptical of this: there's a lot of cheap labor out there.
The only way it makes the US better off is that is places restraints on the US itself. So perhaps that is for the best. But it seems like it would be much better for the United States for it to be a sole superpower and use its power wisely than deal with the risks of a multipolar world.
The French Revolution was launched when things were improving and fought most radically in the areas that improved the most. One really can't say where there is discontent there is decline.
The American Revolution too, and I'd be very interested to see that pitch made (in particular I think there's a great argument that social media/the internet achieved a similar effect) but just because it happened twice does not mean it happened that way every time. I think your case would be stronger if you argued that this was what was happening based on specific facts. My argument (that the forces of stability, the educated elites, messed up - which I wouldn't consider monocausal, necessarily) is based on a lot of specific things that happened. The French Revolution is also admittedly a specific thing that happened but the connection here is merely by analogy.
Because the good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burdens are like bitter medicine and unpalatable leafy greens while populist promise that actually sweet cocktails are not only tastier but healthier. Worse the presidential cycle and delayed impact of good policy often reward the populist elected because things weren't getting better fast enough the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the investments from the good policy even while they hand out the seed corn.
I tend to agree with this but as phrased, this is mostly a generalized argument in favor of any policy that is painful over the short term and against policies that seem nice over the short term, (and as such an argument against, say, offshoring to China!) when I think the reality is slightly more complicated.
Shrike
3d ago
The decline I'm arguing against and would justify how we're better at dealing with communists coming to power now than we will be in five or ten years isn't caused by a recession, which while bad will pass.
The decline that is most readily apparent to me relative to 1990 is the decline of the United States as the world's sole superpower relative to other nations. Pretty much everything else can still be argued, but that is a very unambiguous decline in relative standing. Do you disagree?
Populists are making things worse by getting elected and putting pressure on politicians do things like rent control or putting broad tariffs on our allies.
I agree with this, but it seems to me that there is always someone peddling bad ideas. Why are they gaining traction? It seems to me that all the answers point to some sort of decline (although to be fair that could be something like your setback and not like FC's decline).
responsible for everything while declaring their own leadership as non-elite even if they're the president of the united states or a billionaire. In practice there aren't any two groups in existence you can't force into the plucky rebels vs empire framing that slop loving people won't slurp up if it gives them that "we're the righteous underdogs" tingles.
Sure, this sort of rhetoric is very real. One of the problems with talking about populism is that while it is not true that "everything is populism" it is true that pretty much everyone makes populist appeals in a democracy, particularly if they don't have anything better to run on.
But why pound the table with this sort of rhetoric when you have a track record of good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burden of living?
Shrike
3d ago
I do think there's some truth to this, although I am interested in your unpacking the "conservative blue-triber" angle a bit more.
It's also very frustrating for me because people often treat succeeding at shaping law and culture as sort of mysterious, which it really isn't - there are actually concrete things you can do that, while not a guarantee, make it more likely that you will succeed in shaping culture and law! And the idea of "Cthulhu only swims left," while it has some usefulness, can quickly become a "as an iron law of nature, the right always loses" and that's neither true nor helpful (except for the left).
Shrike
3d ago
Here's where I point out that I said populism is making things worse, not that it's responsible for most bad events.
Okay, but I think that bad events make things worse, too. If you are claiming populism is making things worse (which I have some directional sympathy for), it's fair to ask what bad events it is responsible for. Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Which is part of why a "top ten bad things since 1990" list could be instructive.
I don't really see the scale to be from populist to bipartisan so much as populist to stability.
The reason I wanted to flag the bipartisaness of the decisions was because you claimed that evaluating those sorts of decisions was likely to get dragged down into partisan bickering. I don't really see it. Do Republicans get mad if you say "yeah I think you know we should have deported the 9/11 hijackers before they flew into the World Trade Center?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Republicans. Do Democrats get mad if you say "yeah I think Clinton shouldn't have deregulated the banking industry?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Democrats.
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation.
Certainly I agree with this.
Populism is when complex topics are collapsed down to simple narratives about how things could be great if not for ${outgroup_schemes} and all we need to do is implement ${simple_fix} and that second order effects are made up by ${hated_outgroup} to prevent good policy.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think (for instance) that the "Russia hacked our elections" narrative should qualify as populism, even though I definitely think it could at times collapse a complex topic (foreign interference in US elections) into a simple narrative about how things could be great if not for Russian schemes and all we need to do is implement counter-disinformation schemes and all free speech concerns were made up by MAGA-types to prevent good policy.
Wikipedia's stab at it is more "political stances that emphasise the idea of the "common people", often in opposition to a perceived elite" and I think I prefer that definition, even with the typo - it seems both less pejorative and less prone to "everything is populism."
Shrike
4d ago
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense.
Is this really true? The #1 worst political decision [ETA: made since 1990] was probably
- Ignoring 9/11 warning signs
Is that really a partisan nonsense thing? Can't everyone agree that in hindsight it was a mistake for the Bush administration to decide they had more important things to do than listen to the steady drumbeat of warnings about al-Qaeda?
I am rating this as #1 because the cost-to-benefit ratio of rolling up the hijackers before 9/11 is insanely good. There are obvious downsides to counterfactuals on any of the below but putting a tail on Atta or rolling up al-Mihdhar for his alleged role in the Cole bombing or anything like that potentially dodges 9/11 and all of the mess since entirely, basically for free, and potentially mitigates some of the bad effects of the below as well.
Other candidates:
-
Changing banking regulations, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. This was bipartisan!
-
NATO expansion. This was bipartisan!
-
Offshoring (and related China policy). This was bipartisan!
-
Perhaps COVID policy. This was arguably bipartisan, but I will concede that it is very much a partisan nonsense attracter.
Generally speaking it seems to me that the populists either did not care about these issues or were directionally correct (Chinese manufacturing has been a populist bugbear for decades.) There might have been some populist pressure in the wrong way on the subprime mortgage crisis - which I know little about; I seem to recall some accusations that government policy actually pressured banks to give out bad loans, which I don't think is what right-wing populists have in mind when they support "deregulation."
Either way, it seems to me like a lot of the worst decisions were endorsed by bipartisan elites, and I think the case for that is much stronger than the case for the populists getting everything right.
Shrike
4d ago
I think "let the evidence taken unlawfully be used and then punish the cops" could in theory be a successful policy, but nobody has the guts to punish the cops enough to make that work. If someone says "illegal search" or "warrantless search" I hear "breaking and entering, corruption of a public official" but there's zero desire to trade the exclusionary rule for that, and if someone did offer the trade I wouldn't take it because those charges would ~never be filed.
Shrike
4d ago
I'm tentatively excited about this ruling as possible proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left
I'll be more excited about it when SCOTUS agrees, but I think that there is already ample proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left. School choice and right-to-carry/open-carry being big examples.
The thing is that "state passes school choice bill, parents use it" or "state passes right-to-open-carry bill, thousands NOT killed" aren't really gripping headlines.
Shrike
4d ago
I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.
There's a huge lesson here that the right may never learn, because they got lucky with Elon. The thing is you cannot have your strategy revolve around getting lucky with a billionaire. You need to build institutions that will accomplish what you want.
In the right's defense, they were learning this before Elon bought Twitter, and they have made progress on that front.
Shrike
7d ago
I think my favorite part of The Mothman Prophecies might be the very beginning, where Keel talks about the ill-omened visitation of the strange, otherworldly devil disguised as a man upon a rural homestead...before explaining that the devilish creature was in fact himself, wearing a (then-unusual) beard and (if memory serves) in need of a phone due to car trouble, or somesuch. Even if he was a bit of a crank magnet, I think he was at least self-aware about it.
(Although I seem to specifically recall that Keel says that the CIA would not, in fact, harass random people simply for seeing a UFO, but that may not have been in the Mothman Prophecies, or I might be thinking of Vallee or one of their fellow-travelers.)
Shrike
10d ago
I have not investigated the degree to which autonomous targeting has made its way down to FPV-sized drones, but that's an expensive solution and machine imaging is pretty brittle.
Fiber-optic drones are also very tricky (they can't circle a target, for instance, because that might break the cable!) - apparently to the degree that some Ukrainians prefer radio-controlled ones despite the ease of disabling them. Furthermore they are insanely expensive right now thanks to AI datacenter construction (no, really!)
Shrike
11d ago
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms
Sure. I am against drone maximalism, not drone usage.
And that's assuming the tech remains static, which it wont.
Right, it will evolve in ways that harm drones as currently employed. You know what's cheaper than a single AI-targeted drone with a 20km range and a cheap armor-penetrating warhead? A tiny interceptor drone with no warhead, a .5 km range, and a mindless acoustic-homing sensor.
The drones were not one of them and they undeniably moved the battlefield in America's favor.
I don't think this is a settled question.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities.
If America is in a state of civil war, then the conditions of America have radically shifted enough that I don't really think this sort of postulating is particularly illuminating. Suffice to say that in civil wars both sides (particularly at the start) usually find many of the men with guts and ideological firmament the same place they did before the war: in the active duty military.
Shrike
12d ago
Medium term?
Forget guns, right now if you pit an untrained person with a big stick against an untrained person with an FPV drone, the smart money is on the guy with the stick.
From what I can tell, the reason that the warfare in Ukraine looks the way that it does is because of guns. If tomorrow Ukraine turned in all of its guns (I'm including here machine guns, howitzers, mortars, etc.) for an equal cash value of drones, Russia would simply jam the entire frontline and roll their mechanized formations all the way to the Carpathians.
Shrike
12d ago
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
Shrike
12d ago
Right. I guess that "school choice" doesn't brand as "Catholic literati initiative" (and indeed attracts all sorts) which is part of why people don't see the tremendous strides that it has made as "John Senior sequelae."
I think the best way to do some of this is just for the AI not to talk at all. If you go watch the original Blade Runner, Deckard speaks to his computer to enhance a photo. The computer never speaks back. What I'm imagining is just straight-up removing the chatbot feature from AIs [obviously not from AI chatbots, I guess, presumably there will be a use for these]. This wouldn't mean they couldn't communicate. For instance, if I say "Fable, vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me," Fable could just do it and then provide me with an annotated features list in the game folder (which is more helpful than paragraphs of blather anyway). Then, if you want to change something, you read the notes like a human being and provide a list of changes. In my experience, Copilot is already kinda like this, except it often refuses to do what I ask without asking needless clarifying questions. The bottom line is that the AI would not pretend to have "an opinion," it would be a machine that follows instructions. It would make a voter guide for you, but it wouldn't tell you who to vote for. If you did something like that (or asked it to hack the Pentagon, or something) you'd get one of those flashing red error messages and a "beep" like from a 1980s movie.
This also has the slightly salutary effect of saving the consumer compute you're not having an AI go on for paragraphs about whatever they've done. But the real point is to reinforce for the user that it is dealing with a machine. And given that I suspect that purpose-built models tend to be better at their purpose than generalist models anyway, there's potentially lots of uses for models that don't "talk back."
I don't think AI chatbots are going away and I find asking them their opinions pretty fun, so this is not necessarily a gripe about AI. Rather, I think this is a much better way to solve the "let's not outsource our opinions to AI" problem than some sort of limp-wristed "are you sure that's what you want" 'guardrail' that the AI companies would slap onto their product if you asked them for it.
Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the pro-AI people kinda want to outsource their opinions to AI so that might be something of an uphill battle.
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