domain:alexberenson.substack.com
orangecat
2m ago
This whole thing has not been fact checked and is based on one anonymous source... That's enough for you to consider me a nonhuman?
You think you have the moral high ground here?
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2m ago
Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left.
What has accepting being shamed by "the left" brought them?
It hasn't bought them economic prosperity, it hasn't bought them moral prosperity.
The problem with shame is that you can always just say "no" if you're willing and powerful enough to do so. The "right" has regained that power, for the "left" emptied their stores of social credit on wasteful social investments that ultimately failed to pay off/legitimize themselves.
No_one
2m ago
Russians wouldn't settle for 'freezing the conflict', they're not idiots. They're going to demand neutrality or keep fighting.
They have said that over and over.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3m ago
Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side.
Why is this a problem?
Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness
No, events have demonstrated that accepting shame is weakness. Both Smollett and Floyd demonstrate this -- the totally fake Smollett incident got Congress to pass a hate crime law, and the shame about the killing of Floyd resulted in shamefaced politicians dialing back on enforcement of basic laws against real crimes.
They are then welcome to e.g. turn the tables and say it's the left who should be really ashamed for not taking immigration seriously in the first place.
That doesn't work, the left simply sneers at the idea that they could do anything shameful or that the right has any standing to shame them. As I said, it had become an asymmetric weapon, and the breaking of it was necessary.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3m ago
I've no idea what anyone looks like either I just get a mental image reading people's posts, which firms up the more of their posts that I read. There are some posters here where I can't see anything at all, for various reasons.
Edit: You wear steelframed high quality eyeglasses in my mind's eye. German-made, of course.
No_one
4m ago
Please be serious. Where Putin puts his forces after taking out Ukraine is the concern.
There's nothing valuable in the Baltics whatsoever. Nothing at all. The population would mostly flee and be happily snapped up by European union which needs wagies. Baltic sea navigation wouldn't be improved, actually seizing the Baltic state could possibly make western Europe close the Danish straits.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5m ago
Male, early 30s, knitted brow, dark brown hair that sticks up. Heavy framed glasses. Green on March 17. You are surrounded by a yellow aura which belies your vociferous demeanor.
No_one
5m ago
It's not about budgets.
US doesn't have the industrial capacity to counter China. The US war plan, right now, relies on a hail mary of "maybe if we spam 1000 improved Tomahawk missiles at (mobile) Chinese batteries from submarines off the coast we'll be able to kill enough of these to be able to operate carriers near Taiwan.
Mind you US Tomahawk inventory is about 1k. (Or 2k) I dunno, but in any case only a fraction can even hit mobile targets even theoretically and assuming, during a war that US would be able to observe China unmolested by laser satellite dazzlers is brave in itself.
No_one
8m ago
especially when we've been able to help hold back Russian forces for this long while barely even lifting a pinky
Incredible viewpoint. I'd advise never speaking in that manner to Ukrainians because they're going to be justifiably somewhat bitter about the half-million people who died BECAUSE Americans assured Ukraine they could help them defeat Russia.
No_one
13m ago
ISW is considered mostly a joke by people who aren't pro-Ukrainian. Nakedly partisan, not that smart. E.g. they said this about the failed Ukrainian summer offensive.
Putin may have ordered the Russian military command to hold all Russia’s initial defensive positions to create the illusion that Ukrainian counteroffensives have not achieved any tactical or operational effects despite substantial Western support.
TIRM
15m ago
If he's willing to move to and live in a system, then he gets to use "us" and "our" statements. He's walking the walk, so he gets to talk the talk.
The erosion of shame as a social force is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidencies.
Shame comes with fiduciary responsibilities: it is the interest paid on a positive balance of social credit.
When the faction[1] stewarding the account runs out of social credit, or the social interest rate drops to 0 or (worse) goes negative, shame disappears. Wrong but aesthetically pleasing policies decrease this balance, like rioting, defending illegal migration, and hysteria over an uncommon cold- the trick is to limit your imposition of shame to the interest only so you don't run out of it. A virtuous people can do this, but being too focused on your social credit balance compromises you in other ways.
A minimum level of shame (and interest) is required to enforce message discipline. Once you stop having that, you stop being able to generate interest entirely, and the opportunity for rival investors appears to take over stewardship of the account- once the interest rate rises, they're locked in until they overspend or the bottom falls out of the social economy again.
This is now what has happened- the right overspent hard from 2016-2024, and now the left is hunting the right's institutions of social capital generation (academia, etc.)
they are storing it up to be brought down on their asses in much larger quantities later
I disagree. If the left/classical liberals can deliver on its promises- that fixing the abuses of right-wing/progressive privilege will make things better- then the left will start generating social capital [and thus shame] for itself and transition back into being right-wing. The 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win' cycle typifies this- social credit holders always eventually go bankrupt, and this happens slowly, then suddenly.
Elon Musk's claim that empathy is the most dangerous force in society would be the peak example of this phenomenon.
Elon Musk is a liberal (definitionally, but not popularly, left-wing), so he doesn't believe the right should be allowed to accrue any social credit because when they do, the typical abuses happen. Left-wing thought has the opposite problem in that, when the economy switches from a positive-sum to a zero-sum mode, it failed to store up social credit and gives way to whoever the right-wing is at the time; this is why classical liberalism ultimately died in the '80s, and part of why it has returned now.
[1] Right-wing thought is defined by the desire to keep a balance higher than what market conditions otherwise dictate; or in other words, the dominant faction that's seeking to increase and wield a balance in this way is by definition right-wing. (This is currently Progressives- the people who call themselves left-wing- so it's very confusing.) This is also, by definition, why the left "always wins" (Progressives simply believe that calling themselves "the left" means they should always win, but winning ain't a left-wing idea and "correct" isn't a real political identity.)
I don't care about the ban, I'm just saying, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
TIRM
21m ago
granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
So he's probably a communist fleeing anti-communists backed by the US. Then let into the US. "This poor cobra is being oppressed by the mongoose. Quick, let him shelter in our home to keep him safe."
I thought the rules were communists don't count and should not be let in. Googling a bit, the specific immigration policies reference party membership. I suppose this guy was not a communist party member since that was illegal in Chile in 1987. Maybe he was technically eligible for entry only because he couldn't officially join a party matching his ideology. I'm getting more and more skeptical of political asylum. It seems to be misapplied.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
25m ago
To me this thread, from start to finish, is the Britta/Chang plot of the UN episode of Community. But I got here too late to break out my globe and red paint.
Rosencrantz2
25m ago
The erosion of shame as an asymmetric weapon is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidency; the right will no longer accept being shamed.
This is the problem though. Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left. And they won't shame themselves. Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness; I suspect it would be soul death for him to think of himself as having done something wrong or acknowledge contrition. With the regulation that shame provides gone from both directions, nothing can stop awful things being happily written off as costs worth paying in the name of a bigger cause such as lowering immigration.
To my mind a wise right wing person would accept shame for something like this story, if true. They are then welcome to e.g. turn the tables and say it's the left who should be really ashamed for not taking immigration seriously in the first place. That'd be a stronger response, one that keeps shame in play, versus claiming oneself to have moved beyond shame altogether.
TIRM
32m ago
An opinion I've seen for years expressed in this image.
They really try to lay on the tears to get us to agree with their border policies. Like AOC's weeping photoshoot in front of that empty parking lot.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
32m ago
Civ 7 heavily cribbed off competitors like Humankind, and for all the wrong reasons.
The ability to change civs could have been so good. All they needed to do was to be sensible about it.
Start as Rome in the Classical era? Become some kind of post-Roman state in the medieval era, be it Byzantium, France, Germany, England or, if you want to stretch it further, the Ottomans.
Go English? Get the option to remain that way post Enlightenment, or perhaps fork off to America.
You could add more leeway, especially for dead-end states, but avoid absurdities like Caesar running China, or America being a thing in the fucking Stone Age.
The idea of their being an ebb-and-flow to progression, with setbacks at the end of each era, that works great in theory for preventing rampant snowballing, but the current execution is utter ass.
Sigh. I'll go back and look lovingly at my copy of Civ 4. Last entry I wholeheartedly enjoyed.
FtSoA
33m ago
Putin is not putting forces anywhere near other borders. He’s not issuing threats to anyone else.
Please be serious. Where Putin puts his forces after taking out Ukraine is the concern.
You can argue that the Europeans should shoulder the bulk of their own defense, but you seem to be arguing they are paranoid. I would be concerned were I a Moldovan.
The winners of this are not the Western powers, but the weapons manufacturers who made bank off of that money.
Personally I think that's a win-win since we have lost some key industrial capacities for munitions productions. Those are good factory jobs.
And for all that, we managed to turn a six week war into a two year war that went the way it was always going to go, except with more deaths and more destruction, more ordinance buried under now useless farmland.
Two years, huh? At least get your defeatism timeline right please.
France does ok on agriculture despite having the Iron Harvest.
And as far as the West goes, tensions between the West and BRICS wouldn’t be high at all if we’d simply minded our own business.
Just like Putin minded his?
Anyone pretending "BRICS" is a useful label because it represents an actual coalition is just ignorant about geopolitics. For starters, China and India don't get along very well. Who gives a fuck about Brazil or or South Africa as major geopolitical players?
Ironically, there's a far stronger natural argument for defending Ukraine against Russia than there is for defending a rogue Chinese province from its sovereign government. Given that Trump won't even ban TikTok, how on earth would he commit to a serious loss of life and risk of WWIII to defend an island where we have no formal obligation?
Russians didn’t have a problem with us, China didn’t
After the Cold War, the US and Russia have been at loggerheads way before the Ukraine invasion on a host of geopolitical issues.
Same with China. Issues with North Korea and Taiwan didn't begin yesterday.
Iran only hated us over Israel and really not that much.
What universe do you live in? "Only"? "Really not that much"???????????????????
"Death to America" was just for show then? Shame about all the Americans they've killed over the years. I suppose Trump et al have nothing to worry about from those assassination plots.
Zephyr
36m ago
So one thing I think is very common in modern western countries is something like the following:
- No administration may bind a future administration to a promise.
- An administration has a deep, deep desire to do something that they think will take more years than they will be in power.
- So what they do is let themselves be "negotiated" into a position where breaking the promise that they made, although possible, is extremely costly.
If voters want to express a sentiment against something a government has done, sometimes the more rational option is to bite the bullet and do the costlier option, even if it'd be "easier" to not do so. I think for a lot of voters, they've hit that point with immigration.
faceh
36m ago
That sounds like a fair definition for 'escalating pace.'
Not sure what can be done for Ukrainian morale if their sole foray into Russian Territory is now completely reversed. With, allegedly 70k casualties? the scale of this war still blows my mind sometimes.
And man, a lot of westerners who have staked so much of their personality on the belief that Ukraine can win this thing will presumably be inconsolable for a while if Ukraine throws in the towel with Russia making actual territory gains.
Shrike
37m ago
This is not an actual available option.
Why not?
If we have munitions capacity issues what better way to fix them.
Sure, if Ukraine/Europe can release funding to fund US munitions (which I do gather is happening, and that seems fine). But if the US has budget X and they can split it between the Pacific and Europe, or just spend it on the Pacific, the latter option is scarier for China.
What on earth does "bogged down" mean here? I'm not arguing we conduct military operations.
That ship has already sailed. The US has been conducting "non-kinetic" military operations in support of Ukraine's war effort for the duration of the war.
If that's the case, then isn't ISW admitting Russian advances an even stronger signal of accelerated Russian gains?
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