Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10d ago
This is a strange statement. German armies of 1914-45 were massive military overperformers who fought much better than almost all their enemies. The problem was that they kept taking on very powerful enemies and failed to sustain the military industrial base.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
12d ago
I see the logic behind the other three but what does the depression have to do with it?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
20d ago
Soviet Union was a military behemoth that expressed constant interest in taking over Europe and Asia as well as projecting power into Africa and Latin America. A very substantial chunk of western intellectual classes and almost entirety of the new world third world leaders were sympathetic to its ideology to some degree. It was ruled by people who were capable of sanctioning deaths on the order of tens of millions and had almost total political control of their population.
NATO existed to defend the remaining tiny stretch of capitalist Europe against this.
In comparison what’s Russia? A rump state that staged a couple half failed interventions in its generally pretty messed up barely seceded neighbours, and spent the last 3 decades trying to integrate with neoliberal global markets.
England, Italy, France, Germany or even Turkey feels no serious threat from modern Russia. Therefore the “alliance” just lingers on as a braindead useless entity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
21d ago
Certain European countries might, but I seriously doubt “Europe” will arm “itself” anytime soon. Without overwhelming American power to bind the continent it’s clear that European countries have wildly different interests. Besides the threat isn’t really that serious as modern Russia isn’t a particularly strong or aggressive country. Besides European countries already spend quite a bit on defense. The main bottleneck is a lack of fighting spirit and social cohesion.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
29d ago
The same bizarre situation is going on in entire Western Europe. People talking about the need to decouple from the US, so we can defend Taiwan?? I think we are living through one of those periods confusion in history that will be sandpapered by near-term historians in accordance with the developments that takes place by then, only for some guy to open some dusty archives in 70 years and realize "wait a minute actual people 2025 had wildly idiosyncratic ideas that didn't fit at all into the 2039 galactic federation council's ideological splits!!"
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I remember the people dropping dead videos as well. Was one of the first things I have ever seen mentioning Covid when a friend shared one of those in a group chat. Entirely forgotten and memory holed
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I can’t imagine that with the current pace of development at cheap conversational LLMs, soon we won’t start seeing RPGs that are truly open world with actually intelligent NPCs or strategy games where the AI controlled opponents are truly strategising and conspiring etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
This is a fair haired blue eyed German guy who used contact lenses fake mustache and hair dye to disguise himself as a Turkish migrant worker for literally years in Germany to write a book about the life of those workers. I don’t think it takes that much to disguise yourself. Besides you don’t have to keep it up all the time like the journalist did. Only when you interact with the state
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Imagine you are a German who has some troubles and needs a second identity to escape the law or whatever. It’s 2015. What stops him from dying his hair black, putting on some shabby clothes, and presenting himself as a newly arrived refugee with no documents? He can even draw quite a bit of money from social welfare and after half a decade he gets a brand new German passport not attached to a real person which can be extremely valuable in right circumstances. What stops him from doing this 10 times with 10 different disguises? Or a gang doing this with real refugees at scale?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
In the third world the difference between countries with lots of homelessness and little homelessness is typically how easy it is to squat land around the cities. Even in the poorest places you won't see that many homeless people if anyone can go 20km in the direction of the poorest urban settlement and build a shack right after the last round of shacks. Much wealthier third world countries that restricts such settlement will have lots of visible homelessness.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
To me it sounds like all 4 types of work you list here are rather...similar?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I don't have any advise sorry but how automatable do you think this job is by some combinations of OCR/LLM/GUI to keep humans in the loop when needed?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Is this all over Turkey paying rather measly sums of money to this guy because we struggle to bribe anyone of actual importance?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023 and describes a future hypothetical based on the statements of Israeli politicians at the time. That hypothetical turned out to be more correct than not.
Stop masturbating with words. If you want to mass murder people have the courage to actually say so.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023. In the last year Israel has murdered about 50k. I am not IDF high command but it’s clear they would gladly work up this number if they weren’t under tremendous international pressure.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Sorry for discrediting myself by describing killing a couple hundred thousand people out of a population of 2 million as genocide.
Eager to hear more of your genocide-free strategy of starving them instead and bombing those “meat shields”. Oh and the final option forcefully cleansing the land of them.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
This is pretty much the only comment in this thread that really gets the crux of the issue. Cartels aren't some insurgency or terrorist group. They are an integral part of the Mexican state as well as the American intel agencies. Actually trying to enter into a hot fight with them is an option that will get Trump go the way of JFK very quickly.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
That is how I used to feel about Facebook until around 2019 and I am in my 20s. Everyone I know was actively on it and all the social events were organized using it. I fondly remember throwing house parties with Facebook events or having an active feed where actual friends and family would both share wholesome photos but also their opinions about stuff or music etc. I could post anything I found interesting and expect a bunch of comments and chatter about it. Picture/video/algorithm based social media is such a bad replacement in comparison.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
What’s up with Nasim Taleb? I read Black Swan recently and found it generally insightful. But the guy constantly boomerposts on twitter and gets into pretty stupid arguments calling people racist for mentioning IQ
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
For some reason it didn’t occur to me that people pay for any of this AI stuff
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Right now I am rather wealthy in both aspects but this is a while ago and I was just a broke backpacker back then
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
As someone who admittedly did something similar to the described tourist at some point in my life, the biggest difference was that I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects. (Also I am not particularly “white” to a westerner but in the third world I am. Weird dualism of being Turkish..)
People are generally accepting of class differences and its consequences in their own societies to sometimes extreme degrees. But they tend to get angry and develop some class consciousness very quickly when it’s the foreigners doing the same and disrupting the existing cultural norms. Perhaps it’s because this also bothers local elites and they are the only people whose opinions actually really count.
The great genius of American world empire compared to the previous European attempts was to avoid appointing any visible American rulers to its colonies but instead co-opt the local elites to run their own countries like colonies and share the spoils through opaque financial means.
Border police is what happens when you have police with almost no checks. It’s often pure anarcho-tyranny for its own sake. You can wave through literal millions of third world immigrants enough to cause total demographic change. But as long as the police makes one random English backpacker suffer for minor procedural violations (and often not even that), everyone feels good.
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