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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
wirehead-wannabe
sadoeconomist

I hope McCain takes the time left to him to reflect on the experiences he’s lived through - for someone to suffer through some of the worst of the pointless cruelty war has to offer, to then turn around and work to inflict that on others, is something I’ll never be able to comprehend

Hearing about his brain cancer got me thinking, though…I don’t know that the rest of the world would forgive the US if we had something like the Nuremberg trials for everybody involved in the last few administrations, the targeted drone killing program, the decisions to begin wars in various countries under false pretenses or completely without justification, Guantanamo Bay and all the rest of it, and brought the country back under some semblance of the rule of law

But I’m pretty sure they won’t forgive us if we don’t do something like that before too many of the war criminals involved start dying of natural causes without seeing justice under the international law we once championed

mitigatedchaos

It took the memetic force of Donald Fucking Trump to get the Republicans to admit the Iraq War was a bad idea. Hypocrites that they are, the Democrats have mostly given the Obama Administration a pass, even though from what I’ve read Libya is now worse off. Although really the worst thing about all this is this shit doesn’t even work and they have the backbone for drone strikes but NOT the backbone to properly occupy Afghanistan and forcibly modernize it over one generation so that the “nation building” sticks. And forcibly modernizing the territory SHOULD be a lot more threatening than just wrecking it!

Source: sadoeconomist politics
discoursedrome

Anonymous asked:

this is why they don't want to let birds on Tumblr. wildlife conservation is gonna be pissed after you've grimaced yourself to death on discourse. don't you owe it to Australia's environment to log off and go hunt small rodents?

argumate answered:

I just find it amusing that every self-described leftist who accuses me of being a fascist invariably gets torn to pieces by other self-described leftists a week later, who then get torn to pieces in turn, and so on ad infinitum, like a bizarre political karma system.

kontextmaschine

I’d always heard about the left’s — factionalism? circular firing squads? Like, “People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front” har har har but boy did tumblr make that real to me

Not JUST the way that the left - political, cultural, etc. would tear itself up constantly, drive off potential allies, etc., but the contrast.

Like, remember the “Axis of Evil” of right-tumblrs a few years ago? Whose symbol was ? (“equality” woulda worked too, I thought)

If ANYONE, they were an incoherent coalition, from Christian traditionalists to proto-ancap free marketers to Third Reich cosplayers to folks from Jewish expat anticommunist traditions like Communism Kills, but they stayed friendly, pissing out of the tent

discoursedrome

The essential irony of people who want to destroy the left (and this also goes for feminism specifically, and for Marxism specifically) is that the only thing keeping those groups from destroying themselves is the external pressure of enemies who blatantly belong to an outside faction and lump them all together. If there was a sustained 20-year period where nobody worth noticing was trying to destroy “the left” it would atomize completely from its own internal conflicts.

I’m not exactly sure what the deal is, honestly. I think it’s a thing to some extent on the right, but why it’s so much more prevalent on the left, that eludes me.

mitigatedchaos

For a long time, my estimate was that there are simply more ways to be left-wing than to be right-wing.

I’m no longer so sure.  

I’ve discussed what WW called “localism-ingroupism” on this blog, and perhaps the right-wingers are, in some sense, less universalist.  If one believes in a world of nations and differing traditions, it isn’t so necessary that literally every territory on Earth adopts the One True Ideology.

Or maybe it’s just that the right-wingers do have a higher neural threat recognition and consider themselves outnumbered even when they aren’t.

Source: argumate politics
poipoipoi-2016

tropylium asked:

A fact about NATO that to me seems to go strangely elided in the discussion: the alliance has plenty more countries in it than just the US and the Baltics. US clearly has strongest single military, but even if assuming maximal US waffling and vagueness, any threats againt NATO members are still held in check also by, for starters, pretty much the entirety of Western Europe.

xhxhxhx answered:

That’s fair, but I believe the United States has advantages in procurement, development, and air support, larger reserves of manpower and materiel, and more military experience than the Europeans. 

In a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia, I believe only the Americans have the combined arms forces with the military superiority to roll back Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic states.

The United States has about 14,000 military aircraft, while Russia has 3,800. But the principal allies together have fewer aircraft than that: France has 1,300, Britain has 850, and Germany has 700

Even if qualitative and personnel superiority allow the smaller allied forces to fight Russia to a draw – and the Russians will have combat experience that allies lack – I’m skeptical that Europeans will have the air superiority they need to advance on the ground.

On the ground, the United States has about 5,900 tanks and 41,000 armored fighting vehicles. Russia has about 20,000 tanks and 31,000 AFVs. The Europeans have fewer than that: France has about 400 tanks and 6,900 AFVs, Britain has about 250 tanks and 6,000 AFVs, and Germany has about 550 tanks and 5,900 AFVs.

I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate those military numbers, but the Europeans are not prepared to fight and win a ground war against Russia without air superiority, and I don’t know how long it would take the Europeans to procure the materiel and manpower to reverse Russian gains. 

They would need that, because Russia will have an enormous military advantage at the beginning of the war. NATO runs war games, and the outcome isn’t happy, even with US and European allies working together:

Across multiple plays of the game, Russian forces eliminated or bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities. Four factors appeared to contribute most substantially to this result.

First and obviously, the overall correlation of forces was dramatically in Russia’s favor. Although the two sides’ raw numbers of maneuver battalions—22 for Russia and 12 for NATO—are not badly disproportionate, seven of NATO’s are those of Estonia and Latvia, which are extremely light, lack tactical mobility, and are poorly equipped for fighting against an armored opponent. Indeed, the only armor in the NATO force is the light armor in a single Stryker battalion, which is credited with having deployed from Germany during the crisis buildup prior to the conflict. NATO has no main battle tanks in the field.

Meanwhile, all Russia’s forces are motorized, mechanized, or tank units. Even their eight airborne battalions are equipped with light armored vehicles, unlike their U.S. counterparts.

Second, Russia also enjoys an overwhelming advantage in tactical and operational fires. The Russian order of battle includes ten artillery battalions (three equipped with tube artillery and seven with multiple-rocket launchers), in addition to the artillery that is organic to the maneuver units themselves. NATO has no independent fires units at all, and the light units involved in the fight are poorly endowed with organic artillery.

Third, NATO’s light forces were not only outgunned by the much heavier Russian units, but their lack of maneuver ability meant that they could be pinned and bypassed if the Russian players so desired. By and large, NATO’s infantry found themselves unable even to retreat successfully and were destroyed in place.

Finally, while NATO airpower was generally able to take a substantial toll on advancing Russian troops, without adequate NATO ground forces to slow the attack’s momentum, there is simply not enough time to inflict sufficient attrition to halt the assault. Airpower is rate limited, and against a moderately competent adversary—which is how we portrayed the Russian Air Force—NATO’s air forces had multiple jobs to do, including suppressing Russia’s arsenal of modern surface-to-air defenses and defending against possible air attacks on NATO forces and rear areas. This further limited NATO air’s ability to affect the outcome of the war on the ground. Without heavy NATO ground forces to force the attackers to slow their rate of advance and assume postures that increased their vulnerability to air strikes, Russian players could meter their losses to air by choosing how to array and move their forces.

Russia’s tactical advantages make victory in the Baltics a fait accompli. That means that Europeans can only make victory in a protracted campaign, and I am deeply skeptical that the Europeans are willing to go it alone. I’m not even sure they’d be willing to do it with American help. 

European electorates outside the Russian borderlands are also deeply skeptical of military action, even in defense. Only 18 percent of Germans, 27 percent of Britons, and 29 percent of the French are willing to fight for their country. The French and British establishments believe in the alliance, but I’m skeptical that the deeply pacifist German electorate is prepared for conflict.

image

If there were a political solution available – supposing the Russians install an amenable client government in the Baltic states, and offer a compromise peace with the Western Europeans – I am not certain that the Germans would hold out for something more.

Without Germany, without the United States, and with the Baltic states already under Russian occupation, I don’t think the Atlantic alliance has a leg to stand on, even if the Balts and Poles put up a heroic resistance. Even with the Americans and the Germans, the Russian fait accompli in the Baltics presents the allies with hard choices, as RAND points out:

A rapid Russian occupation of all or much of one or two NATO member states would present the Alliance with three options, all unappetizing. First, NATO could mobilize forces for a counteroffensive to eject Russian forces from Latvia and Estonia and restore the territorial integrity of the two countries. Under the best of circumstances, this would require a fairly prolonged buildup that could stress the cohesion of the alliance and allow Russia opportunities to seek a political resolution that left it in possession of its conquests. Even a successful counteroffensive would almost certainly be bloody and costly and would have political consequences that are unforeseeable in advance but could prove dramatic.

Any counteroffensive would also be fraught with severe escalatory risks. If the Crimea experience can be taken as a precedent, Moscow could move rapidly to formally annex the occupied territories to Russia. NATO clearly would not recognize the legitimacy of such a gambit, but from Russia’s perspective it would at least nominally bring them under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella. By turning a NATO counterattack aimed at liberating the Baltic republics into an “invasion” of “Russia,” Moscow could generate unpredictable but clearly dangerous escalatory dynamics. 

On a tactical level, a counteroffensive campaign into the Baltics would likely entail the desire, and perhaps even the necessity, of striking targets, such as long-range surface-to-air defenses and surface-to-surface fires systems, in territory that even NATO would agree constitutes “Russia.” Under Russian doctrine, it is unclear what kinds or magnitudes of conventional attacks into Russian territory might trigger a response in kind (or worse), but there would certainly be concern in Washington and other NATO capitals about possible escalatory implications.

Finally, it is also unclear how Russia would react to a successful NATO counteroffensive that threatened to decimate the bulk of its armed forces along its western frontier; at what point would tactical defeat in the theater begin to appear like a strategic threat to Russia herself? 

The second option would be for NATO to turn the escalatory tables, taking a page from its Cold War doctrine of “massive retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied. This option was a core element of the Alliance’s strategy against the Warsaw Pact for the duration of the latter’s existence and could certainly be called on once again in these circumstances. 

The deterrent impact of such a threat draws power from the implicit risk of igniting an escalatory spiral that swiftly reaches the level of nuclear exchanges between the Russian and U.S. homelands. Unfortunately, once deterrence has failed—which would clearly be the case once Russia had crossed the Rubicon of attacking NATO member states—that same risk would tend to greatly undermine its credibility, since it may seem highly unlikely to Moscow that the United States would be willing to exchange New York for Riga. Coupled with the general direction of U.S. defense policy, which has been to de-emphasize the value of nuclear weapons, and the likely unwillingness of NATO’s European members, especially the Baltic states themselves, to see their continent or countries turned into a nuclear battlefield, this lack of believability makes this alternative both unlikely and unpalatable.

The third possibility would be to concede, at least for the near to medium term, Russian control of the territory they had occupied. Under this scenario, the best outcome would likely be a new cold war, with the 21st century’s version of the old “inner German border” drawn somewhere across Lithuania or Latvia. The worst be would be the collapse of NATO itself and the crumbling of the cornerstone of Western security for almost 70 years. 

If the Americans believe they must “trade New York for Tallinn,” or Rostock for Riga, or Calais for Kaunas, or Hampstead for Helsinki, I’m not sure they’d be willing to make the trade. So I’m a bit concerned. Yes, I’m a bit concerned about this, that, and the other thing, about events that might precipitate this eventuality, or perhaps something worse.

Americans and Europeans both might decide to “respect Russia’s interests in its traditional sphere of influence,” whatever that might mean for their six million Baltic allies. 

Who would even notice?

poipoipoi-2016

This entire post is why we’re begging Europe to please spend some money on your military.

They have an extra 100 Million people, and a couple trillion extra dollars.

Asking that NATO not be America and 20-odd nation’s we have to be the sole defense of is not unreasonable.

/And…. In the meantime, Trump’s going after Russia’s only political leverage so.

mitigatedchaos

Well, how does one get people to become willing to literally fight to the death to support wishy-washy liberal multiculturalism and large-scale migration?

After all, under such conditions, one does not really own one’s country, or any country, and everywhere is just a multicultural blend, so the logical thing to is just leave whenever threatened until your back is against the wall and it’s reduced to one nation again.

Who will fight in the nation’s army if there is no national pride as all developed nations are in the debt of infinite sin?  And who will fund a regional army if having a military is something only for oppressive colonialists?  Much less that the issues the regional army might deal with are someone else’s problem.

Source: xhxhxhx politics
discoursedrome
discoursedrome:
“ isaacsapphire:
“ akaltynarchitectonica:
“ livefromthehumanzoo:
“ What if I told you they were the same thing?
”
This is another of these weird American idiosyncrasies that is just not a thing elsewhere in the developed world. (Or at...
livefromthehumanzoo

What if I told you they were the same thing?

Originally posted by classicmoviescenes

akaltynarchitectonica

This is another of these weird American idiosyncrasies that is just not a thing elsewhere in the developed world. (Or at least not on a comparable scale)

I’d guess it’s a product of police departments in the USA being very localised, with even small towns sometimes having directly elected sheriffs or the mayor controlling the local police. In the UK and other European countries police forces tend to have much more national oversight and organisation.
Probably also something to do with how police forces are funded in the US gives them more incentive to acquire money directly.
This is the only thing I could find that talks about the difference. https://www.quora.com/What-other-countries-have-laws-similar-to-the-Civil-Asset-Forfeiture-laws-in-the-US (Seems like the main difference is in other places you can only take assets after a conviction, )

I’m increasingly convinced that the much greater popularity of libertarianism in the US compared to other countries is not due to the cultural things people normally talk about, but because the American government is just weirdly and uniquely bad.

isaacsapphire

Huh.

BTW, it’s not exactly about control, but funding. Tiny Town just doesn’t have much of a tax base, and the tax base gets to directly vote on the budget in a lot of small towns, so it’s hard to increase the taxes for education and police budgets. Filling budget shortfalls by essentially robbing passing travelers and the least popular citizens can be a popular method of keeping the lights on at the station, especially when it means more money in every property owners’ pocket.

I think probably a lot of it is, the United States is less of a country than most (all?) other developed/First World countries, in that there’s a LOT more regional and local control, and deep seated resistance to changing that for multiple reasons, including full out religious paranoia, and lack of faith in the federal government to be competent.

discoursedrome

Here in Canada, asset forfeiture has been a pretty serious problem in BC and Ontario, for basically the same reason: it’s a way to increase revenues without being perceived as raising taxes. BC and Ontario also have recently had the most corrupt provincial governments in the country, which may have something to do with it. BC’s just had a change of government, and I’ll be interested to see if they deal with this or if it simply doesn’t affect enough of the voting base to bother them. I don”t have much hope of Ontario dealing with it, since if they go out it’ll be the Tories replacing them, and the Tories as a rule are much more committed to looking pro-police and anti-criminal than they are to small government.

mitigatedchaos

In some US states civil asset forfeiture is prohibited, and so are speeding ticket quotas for cops.  I haven’t been able to figure out how this might be reproduced in other states.

As for the origins, I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to density WRT infrastructure.  Not only do we have exodus from cities depriving them of revenue, but the suburbs are pretty sparse, requiring more concrete/pipe/powerlines per resident.

Source: libertybill politics
ranma-official
ranma-official

“the word nazi has lost all its meaning now, thanks, liberals” is a cold take because people called each other nazis for no reason for over 50 years. what concerns me is the devaluing of the word “violent”.

mitigatedchaos

Well, there was a time when the word “Neo-Nazis” meant something at least.  Not so much anymore.

But yes, this equivocation over the meaning of violence is quite deliberate.  Definitely trying to exploit the taboo sane people have against punching people who aren’t literally punching other people.

Also, all political ideologies can claim that their enemies being in power is “violent,” because states have number of cops greater than one (or anarchist villages use locals instead of dedicated cops).  Really don’t want to normalize this.

politics
xhxhxhx
xhxhxhx

mitigatedchaos reblogged your post: @poipoipoi-2016: So what just happened with Trump?…

Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.

Which is why the reporting should change their minds, but won’t. It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their politics depends on them not understanding it.

Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.

I have nothing but contempt for this canard. It imagines a fantastical risk of conflict over a small, irrelevant Middle Eastern country, while ignoring the grave risks of nuclear war over treaty allies in Europe, which Trump’s election has substantially heightened.

But even if you did believe that, Clinton’s foreign policy is irrelevant now. Trump’s foreign policy is not.

mitigatedchaos

Well, that is the difficulty with oppositional politics.

I wonder if in multi-party systems, the standard for “better than the other guys” is higher.  Probably not.

politics
blackjackgabbiani
blackjackgabbiani

@mitigatedchaos it isn’t dodging anything. I’m looking at actions and deeds regardless of who they come from.

Plus I’m not sure what your overall point is. Nobody is tolerant of everything. We wouldn’t have opposition to tyrrany if that was the case. Having a bit of intolerance doesn’t negate being pro-diversity.

mitigatedchaos

My point was laid out in the original post: it is entirely normal for people not to want their culture replaced, this is not a unique evil of vile Trump voters which crawled up out of a cave somewhere, and people on the left are the same way.

What I’m trying to explain is that when you lose cultural dominance, you don’t just lose cultural dominance over the little things like what music plays in the local bar.  You lose them over the big things as well.  It isn’t your culture’s decision anymore.  And that can hurt.

Liberal/Progressivism itself has a sort of meta-culture which the Robert E. Lee statue violates.  But if our hypothetical confedernecks establish themselves as a majority, then the progressives don’t get to make that decision anymore.  Laws follow culture, not just alter it.

Some hostile cultural aspects can be neutralized without really trying to, but they aren’t all so vulnerable to liberal social atomization.  My concern, in part, is that since you don’t understand just what it is you’re trying to do, you won’t be able to summon the political will to do what is necessary for your plans.

politics
blackjackgabbiani

blackjackgabbiani asked:

Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)

mitigatedchaos answered:

Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.

You can just block quote it and tag me, like

@mitigatedchaos

oh look a quote here lol

Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.  

Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.

So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place.  Respecting such things is itself part of culture.

And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.

(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.  

And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)

blackjackgabbiani

But when someone puts up a symbol of hate that isn’t the same thing as “wanting diversity”. That’s not wanting a symbol of hate. Same as I would want from anyone living here already. I’m applying the same standards to newcomers that I am to established locals.

mitigatedchaos

The rednecks don’t believe that it’s a symbol of hate.  Cultural difference.  Why aren’t you respecting that?

blackjackgabbiani

So why do they want a statue of him? There are tons of Southern leaders and heroes who don’t stand for racism.

mitigatedchaos

They would argue that Robert E. Lee in particular does not stand for racism, but both loyalty to one’s duties as a soldier, freedom from federal tyranny, and so on.

It doesn’t actually matter.  They don’t see it as racist.  Either you can respect that culture, or you see your own culture as superior.  

blackjackgabbiani

How would that be seeing my own culture as superior?

There are some things in cultures–all cultures–that are objectively bad. Fighting them in people of other cultures the same as you do when you fight it in your own doesn’t show that you think either culture is superior. It shows that there are problems facing society as a whole, the combination of cultures and them as individuals.

mitigatedchaos

Child marriage is cultural.  FGM is cultural.  To pick an example closer to American shores, circumcision is cultural.

You can argue whether human rights are cultural or not, but clearly believing in human rights is cultural, and people argue regularly over what is and is not a “right”.  (Medical care, for instance.)

So no, if you think culture A which has no FGM is better than culture B which does have FGM, you think culture A is superior.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics
mutant-aesthetic
abellionhearts
“This is a drawing I finished today [July 20, 2017] to represent the kind of president we could have (if he was a sane individual, of course) but we just don’t for various reasons. If you are a Trump supporter you aren’t allowed to...
mitigatedchaos

abellionhearts

This is a drawing I finished today [July 20, 2017] to represent the kind of president we could have (if he was a sane individual, of course) but we just don’t for various reasons. If you are a Trump supporter you aren’t allowed to interact with this post. […]

Have we reached Maximum Trump?

I dare to say that no, we have not!

Total saturation of the airwaves has not been achieved.  Somewhere out there, there continue to be TV broadcasts which contain NO MENTION of Donald J. Trump, the first Meme-American President of the United States of America.

This will not do.

The amount of Trump must be increased.

Projections under the previous Trump First Initiative showed that merely amplifying the existing Trump will not do due to local radio spectrum saturation, supported by a number of field tests.  It was for this reason that the Trump First Initiative was scrapped.

My colleagues in the Mecha-Bannonite program were pessimistic and skeptical after the cancellation of Trump First.  They said no increase in the memetic saturation of Trump was possible.

But I have proved them wrong!

I have developed new mathematical models which prove that further meme propagation is possible, with only a slight alteration of the meme waveform band.

Based on heuristical data gathered from pools of eligible voters, I have used a neural network to model the meme space of possible Trumpforms in order to achieve greater propagation, and thus memetic saturation.

All that is required to more than quintuple current saturation of the memespace is the creation of seven additional trumpforms, similar to the ones constructed by computer render above.

Then, finally, all mention of politicians other than Trump can be completely erased from broadcast journalism, allowing our organization to progress towards Phase 2 of Operation Meteor 2020.

Source: abellionhearts shtpost sorry artist guy politics trump cw augmented reality break