freagle @ freagle @lemmygrad.ml

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1,625

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3 yr. ago

It's an intellectual pursuit like analyzing the situation in Ukraine or analyzing decisions before the FTC or analyzing a football league

I am not talking about speculative fiction and what could happen. I am talking about taking your hypothesis - that alien contact has not happened at all - and attempting to build a steel-person argument against it.

This is how we got the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: 1 assume UAPs are alien ships, 2 assume our understanding of physics is accurate, 3 assume that aliens wouldn't fly all this way for nothing, what could be a possible explanation for 1 and 2? This the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is born and now we can setup experiments to gather sufficient evidence to close out that hypothesis.

I am looking for something similar with regard to the theories of alien contact resulting in an arms race. The best way to defeat any ridiculous hypothesis is to steel-person it.

Such disgustingly deliberate word choice when China hasn't dropped bombs in, what, 60 years? The bombardment is happening in Gaza, not the fucking tech sector

What the hell do you think this country was supposed to stand for when James Madison said that government's role is to protect the opulent minority from the majority, when the revolutionary war broke out around the time England started considering outlawing slavery, when Thomas Jefferson kept slave girls in his bedroom and raped them daily, when Thomas Jefferson lobbies to end the slave trade because it would make his breeding plantations more money, when Mount Rushmore was carved into a sacred mountain out of spite for the indigenous, when the US government killed all the plains buffalo because they had a treaty with the Lakota people that included the term "for as long as the buffalo roam the plains", when the USA without question invaded Vietnam in an attempt to maintain the French colony against the Vietnamese people's desire for liberty, when the USA told Japan not to vacate the Korean peninsula where they raped and tortured people for years so that the USA could take over the colony on their behalf, when the USA took over The Phillipines from King Phillip of Spain and built a brutal occupying military police force so effective that they brought it back to create the State Police system that was used to continue violently breaking strikes when local cops started feeling bad about killing their neighbors, when the Philadelphia police department dropped an incendiary bomb on a housing in a black ghetto because it couldn't arrest some of the people inside it, when the USA imprisons more people per capita than even the height of the Soviet GULAG system when it was housing Nazi POWs, when the USA votes every single year at the UN against the banning of the glorification of Nazis, ....

What do you think this country fucking stands for?

Many of us, myself included, are a bit tired of ignorant people arguing with us as though they aren't ignorant. People who are clearly ignorant do not have a position to argue from except propaganda and vibes. And it's patently obvious who is ignorant because each person who is ignorant when they argue about a topic use the exact same talking points over and over again.

The things you said about Taiwan are things that have been said for years now. They never change. They are repeated ad nauseum. They are part of the big lie. And no matter how many times some of us study the issue and then share what we've learned, another person shows up, sometimes a whole clusterfuck of them, and just unashamedly parrots talking points they got from the same sources the last clusterfuck of people got them.

On this topic, and many others, the debate isn't about facts at all. It's about opinions, values, morality, ethics, and often violent intervention and those things are all based on false beliefs and ignorance. So when people come in saying "Taiwan deserves independence and the USA should protect them", it's not a problem of you need to learn so much as you're willing to come in here and tell people that you support violence on the basis of some narrative that you have not examined, have not spent time researching, and have not struggled through the difficulties of learning about. If you came in arguing facts, the conversation would be very different, but you, like many of us raised in liberal society, lead with vibes that we delude ourselves into thinking are facts.

It's exhausting. Apologies for being harsh with you. I highly recommend learning more.

What a ridiculous position to hold, and my god the brainworms you must have based on your exchange with @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml

Russia actively responds to threats and has been doing so for quite some time. First, it took Crimea. Then it sent lethal support to the Donbas. Then it sent mercenaries into a bunch of countries in North Africa fighting against the West. Then it launched an SMO to militarize the border with Ukraine. Then it attacked Western Ukrainian infrastructure. Then it built an Africa Corps. Then it created economic alternatives to the West. Then it materially supported the West's adversaries. Then it made a change to its nuclear protocol. Then it launched an IRBM.

Russia responding to Western salami slicing with its own salami slicing. Just as the NATO escalations are nuanced, so are Russia's responses. NATO countries still live in peace because they have not declared war on Russia yet. Every time they make another thin slice of the salami, Russia finds a way to respond that is just as thin. However, Russia launched the capture of Crimea and no one could stop it. Russia launched the SMO to secure the Ukranian border and no one could stop. Russia worked to support decoupling of Africa from the West and no one has been able to stop it. Russia is working with partners to work around Western economic dominance and sanctions and no one can stop it.

The Russian military has not made many mistakes and it has not been strategically inactive. From this, we have to conclude that Russia understands its own limits, and I don't think anyone, especially Russia, believes they can or need to fight all of Europe. Likewise, I think Russia is aware, as NATO is aware, there is no way NATO could defeat Russia. The risk, therefore, is that NATO chooses to engage Russia in a long-term war of attrition, and that risk is very very real. Russia's strategic imperatives are therefore 1) to not become encircled, 2) to maintain counter-intelligence supremacy, and 3) to avoid a protracted war of attrition with NATO.

1. is why Russia took Crimea and subsequently invaded Ukraine
2. is why Russia is being judicious with deploying its technology and why it is operating in Africa
3. is why Russia is supporting the opening of additional fronts in Africa, building material support with military powers aligned against the West, building economic alternatives to the West, and most importantly, not giving the West sufficient casus belli to launch an all out war of attrition

You're requirement that for Putin to be strong he must be irrational is ridiculous.

Ukraine is free to determine that NK, China, and Iran are all parties to the war due to their material support of the Russian operation. Ukraine can decide to declare war against those countries. They can go and prosecute that war, if they so choose.

Russia attacked Ukraine because of threats to Russian national security. The "legal framework" or "rules based order" that allowed NATO countries to create those threats to Russia created the conditions under which Russia had two choices - follow the rules exactly and let their belligerent opponents (the North Atlantic empire) continue to build up the threat level, or break the rules and protect itself.

This is why for years the conversation around Russia has been a debate between people who say a security framework must guarantee security for all, on the one side, and on the other side, people who said we only need to guarantee our security and we can threaten the security of others and they can't do anything about it.

ATACMS relies on targeting data that can only be obtained from NATO sources as Ukraine doesn't have its own satellite and airborne recon platform. You could give ATACMS to Ukraine and they could only use it in short ranges because they don't have the data they need to target deep into Russia. That means NATO is literally providing everything except the button pusher - they are providing the missiles, the launchers, the trainings, the satellites, the spy planes, the data infrastructure, the data itself. Ukraine pushes the button.

This is funamdentally different than using a bullet made in one country to kill a person in another country.

And got chewed up for it

It literally has always been part of the nation-state of China. Literally the only thing that allowed the losers of the civil war to create a separatist society is UK/USA intervention, and they intervened because they knew the Red Army would support China's independence from Western hegemony and that the KMT did and would support Western hegemony. Taiwan exists as a separate entity because the North Atlantic empire is using it as a proxy.

Do you realize how close China is to Taiwan? China doing military exercises on the mainland is within striking distance of Taiwan. It is not violent for China to exercise in its own territory. The show of force is intended for the USA, you know, that state who was literally publishing military strategy about using Taiwan to complete its Pacific Kill Chain?

Your vibes don't really matter. Nor do the vibes you get when celebrities apologized for supporting a formerly-fascist currently-vassal community that exists primarily as a means to maintain Western hegemony over the region and particularly over the people and resources of China - a nation-state that includes the island of Taiwan.

You have no idea what imperialism is. It's not vibes.

LOL, your brain is so rotten with propaganda. You believe China arrests people for speaking out, then you see people speaking out and not get arrested, so your first thought is - obviously this isn't China.

Mate, China imprisons far fewer people per Capita than the USA does. China handles protests far more peacefully than the USA does. China has a much more vibrant democracy than the USA does.

Taiwan is the equivalent of "the South will rise again" Americans who wave the Confederate flag. They are Chinese people living on an island after their leaders lost their civil war and the only reason it wasn't immediately brought back into the union is because UK and USA literally sent warships to prevent it from happening. Can you imagine if the confederates retreated to Long Island and then Germany and Russia sent warships to New York harbor to stop the union from integrating Long Island back into the union?

Learn some history.

Try learning about the history instead of vibing.

You have no idea what whataboutism is. You said Russia doesn't respect agreements. The evidence is that the agreements you're talking about were either violated by the West or were adopted by the West in bad faith explicitly to undermine Russian security.

You can't really be so naive as to think that Russia should continue to appease the West after 60 years of the US and Western Europe materially supporting Nazis and fascists, building over 600 military bases in 80 countries encircling Russia and China, claiming to only engage in defensive war when invading and razing dozens of countries, assassinating people all over the world, engaging in illegal collective punishment regimes all over the world, and constantly withdrawing unilaterally from security treaties designed to maintain MAD, human rights, and international security.

You gotta stop reading US and UK news rags when they talk about their opponents. They lie.

If only there was no threat of nuclear ring-fencing by a transnational nuclear-armed military with zero democratic accountability whose founding generals were from the Third Reich

Just fascists being fascists

Let's not forget the word "privatization" was coined by the British to describe what was happening in 1930s Germany

Honestly this is completely ridiculous. Hypertext using HTML constraints is absolutely insufficient for representing application state. It's the wrong tool for the job and always has been, because it conflates document structure with semantic meaning.

Said another way, HTML cannot be relied on to capture a representation of application state.

The reason REST doesn't use HTML in most contexts is because applications don't use HTML in most contexts anymore.

Demanding that application representation use a specific encoding strategy is ridiculous and misses the point entirely, which is that HTTP is no longer the right protocol for the job.

Actually, this entire tragedy is absolutely contextualized by the USA's behavior. The USA has demonstrated, over and over and over that it will launch wars of aggressions against its enemies and it will do so with both its own army and with NATO.

In that context, when the USA spends 30 years saying one thing to Russia and doing another, when it spends decades building forward military bases all over the world to encircle China and Russia, when it moves nuclear-armed submarines and nuclear-armed b52s into theaters on the other side of the world, when it destroys entire countries and rebuilds them as unsinkable aircraft carriers, when it runs military drills that are literally indistinguishable from preparing and launching invasion forces, when it threatens everyone's national security by building capabilities to undermine the international MAD framework, when it regular uses rhetoric saying nuclear strikes are not off the table...

In this context, when the USA is literally taking actions that are known, publicly, internationally, and for decades, to undermine the security of Russia, specifically the creation of forward bases in Ukraine along the border that Russia and the world have all shown for centuries is indefensible, a border a long which Russia has been invaded 3 times by Western Europe, the most recent being the Third Reich, where each invasion killed millions of Russians,

Russia's choice to invade it's neighbor actually makes way more sense when you consider this context. In fact, it is the decontextualization that demand and insist on that makes this so difficult to talk about. You, and liberals like you, literally say to ignore the context and just take this incident in isolation and judge it morally, and then only admit limited context in if we isolate that context and judge that context separately and morally, so that you can say "two wrongs don't make a right". This is bullshit. The case for Russia's invasion has everything to do with the context of the behavior of the US and NATO, and in fact the context of Western Europe, and that context reveals for us a process that has been ongoing for over a century.

You don't get to say, "yeah yeah, the USA does bad things but that doesn't give Russia the right...." When literally the exact reason, stated multiple times by Russia, Russian generals, and the Russian president, AND the assessed reason by NATO generals, US generals, US presidents, European and American diplomats, and independent analysts, is the physical, military, strategic threat posed to the world's 3rd biggest military power by the world's 1st biggest military power.

At some point, you will have to acknowledge that the USA and Western European allies have been militarily threatening Russia since Napoleon marched across Europe to invade Russia via Ukraine, and that this did not stop when Russia became the founder of the USSR and it did not stop when the USSR was dismantled and Russia stood alone again. It did not stop under Bush 1, he continued it. It did not stop when Clinton took office, he continued it. It did not stop when Bush took office, he continued it. It did not stop under Obama, he continued it. It did not stop under Trump, he continued it. It did not stop under Biden, he continued it. The military threat to Russia has been there continuously for over 100 years. Russia has been responding to that threat via military interventions into Ukraine starting ont 2014.

When nations like Russia ignore international agreements, it is in the context of the USA ignoring international agreements. You cannot divorce that context and you cannot pretend they are separate. The USA ignoring international agreements and devastating entire nations is exactly the context in which Russia must maintain its national security. And, like most countries, Russia has watched the foremost military power, the current torch holder of the European empire, the same Empire that has invaded Russia multiple times, has watched that empire violate international agreements and kill millions while simultaneously undermining Russian security. At some point, a response was going to happen, and in fact, everyone in the Western establishment knew it would happen when they made moves to bring NATO into Ukraine because everyone in the establishment KNEW it was strategically required for Russia to do so in order to remain safe. EVERYONE KNEW THIS, it was openly discussed. And the USA, under Clinton and every president since, followed Clinton's position that publicly they would tell Russia Ukraine would remain neutral but privately they would spend decades trying to get Ukraine to join the West and be anti-Russia.

Well guess what. When you know exactly what will undermine someone's security and then you spend 30 years making it happen, you're going to get the response you expect.

Open you eyes to the fact that the invasion of Ukraine is exactly what the USA expected to happen (though they didn't know when Russia would choose to react) and they took all the necessary actions to make it happen. The blood of Ukrainians is on the USA's hands.