If the USA was serious about "Slava"ing the lives of the Ukranians and Rus in general their policy would be very different than it is now. USG is supporting the Ukranian state which is unworthy of the sacrifice of even a single Ukranian.
Guns need men to fire them, and America is the most attractive place for people to migrate to. It would be straightforward to drain both belligerents' manpower pool with immigration policy such that combat operations are not viable. This is one of the core reasons the Soviet Union collapsed; the Berlin wall was the poster child for this. When a nation has to become a prison of serfs to keep things together its army quickly becomes incapable of anything beyond garrison duty. This is because a) that's costly and b) their best and brightest figure out quickly that an ounce of exit beats a ton of voice.
Instead what will we get? Tons of Rus boys get to enjoy the mobik to hamburger pipeline. Hordes of these young men that go fey will destabilize the region for a generation. All the contractors selling $31 million dollar blue tarps here will get away with it scott free, further damning these places to corruption. Millons of acres of land will be poisoned with heavy metals, and generations of people will end up missing legs thanks to landmines. Don't make me get Billy Mays out here, because just wait, there's more.
Anyone who thinks war through quickly figures out the worst peace beats the best war. People don't think it through because that would require a certain bell curve to be a standard deviation to the right of where it actually is. The discourse as such is deoxylated "military intelligence". If the above sentence requires explanation, here's your sign.
America could play a non-malign role on the world stage. That would require a level of intelligence that is clearly not here.
Hell, they can't even manage competently malign! USG may have the best weapons systems on earth, but its pearls before swine. These west point droolers hardly even use transformative weapons that are in the stockpile! They'd rather pretend these systems don't exist so they can keep zipping around in tanks and attack helicopters oblivious to the risk posed thereby. Meanwhile they waste hundred thousand dollar missiles blowing up $300 trucks rather than expose themselves to danger in these expensive boat anchors. But hey, at least they get to go home safe blowing up some shit 200km away that is as likely to be the milkman as Osama Bin Laden. I'm sure strategic hamlets will work this time. We just need to COIN harder guise.
Meanwhile the mainstream discourse is that it would somehow be "bad for America" if we don't smear such incompetence over the entire world. In reality, the reason the 20th Century went so well for the USA was because we largely allowed the war idiots to enervate themselves. Their loss was our gain. If the world descends back into chaos (which is far from guaranteed) we would be better than fine so long as we stay out of it. This of course won't happen, and China gets to laugh all the way to the banks in Taipei and Hong Kong.
The Matthew 5:5 strategy remains 100% vindicated. Stay strapped and hydrated my friends.
βIf they cannot get those machines, they will develop them themselves,β he said in an interview. βThat will take time, but ultimately they will get thereβ¦ The more you put them under pressure, the more likely it is that they will double up their efforts.βUSG acts like the people in Taiwan don't have families over in Fujian, and a strong incentive to get recruited to assist the Chinese build this expertise. Invincible ignorance.
If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an instance. There should be a single binary, self-updating, single-user instance.It's the tragedy of the commons. The core problem to crack is how to make the costs bearable by the users themselves.
What should be clear to anyone paying attention is that both the Racist and Anti-Racist sides of things subscribe to false mental models for largely self-serving reasons, albeit on opposite sides of a core question. That being racists are afraid of loss, while the race-hustlers are lusting for gain. Both sides mental models are in fact useful from their own point of view. As such, most people are both, depending on the situation.
The racists, while rarely being able to articulate this, have the following mental model: Personality is largely heritable. Certain phenotypes have been observed to express 3 traits that in combination roughly align with "unemployable" more often than other phenotypes. Those being willingness to be violent, low intelligence and high disagreeableness. There is no inherent corrective brake on these traits due to them also being attractive mating signals; hybristophillia is a thing.
Stopping here leaves you with two solutions to the problem. Liquidate those expressing these traits in an attempt to eradicate them, or exercise exit. Largely the latter is the choice, as most would prefer to be merely racist rather than racist mass murderers. Such free association being core to the classical liberal program is why the race hustlers are inevitably all socialists of one stripe or another.
Meanwhile the anti-racist camp, insofar as they don't embrace the polylogism of the critical theorists, have valid criticism of this model. Namely, that epigenetics is real. Gene expression in fact changes in response to conditions; as such eradication of these traits is not only evil but impossible. This effect is not as fast as most would like, or even practical within a lifespan, as this is a generational project which is actively undermined by women.
Furthermore, pretty much the entire evo bio field is just as fucked up and irreproducible as the rest of modern science. E.G. it's also a false (but useful) mental model. This is a less strong point than they think, but self-serving skepticism is a strong ingroup signal.
These in combination are enough to advocate for gibs, so that's where they stop.
The trouble of course is when you dig deeper, you find that the period where western phenotypes largely eradicated these traits in combination doesn't fit. In short it was far more racist, christian and liberal than now. Like high prices are the cure for high prices, you might say that racism was the cure for the causes of racism. That is to say, a necessarily incomplete mental model proved useful. Shocker.
Indeed, seeing the reversion in the condition of American blacks since the civil rights act leads many to conclude we need more, not less racism. It should come as no surprise that many blacks' policy preferences are in fact the sort of classical liberalism called conservatism in the USA. They remember what worked and are as tired of "ninja shit" as much as committed klansmen. However given their widespread poverty most have little choice but to align with the race hustlers begging for scraps from master's table.
In all this I see no evidence whatsoever of incentives aligning between the black and white communities in the USA to choose policy which would work (repeal of CRA). What we will instead see is wealthy nonwhite Immigrants and "nonbinary" whites increasingly leverage the CRA to crowd the black community out into deepening poverty and immiseration. This has already lead to black hostility towards Asians and the "nonbinary", who are overwhelmingly the ones leveraging this strategy. Conflict rises, just as the state prefers.
Which brings me to my point. There are a lot of things far worse than racism or race hustling. The state is obviously one of them. It was, after all, "behfel ist behfel", not racism that was used as the defense against genocide at nurenburg. In this case particularly, it's quite obvious state censorship is far worse than (largely private) racism.
As far as flawed mental models go, both racism and antiracism are not exactly high on my threat classification scale. In fact, they can both be useful in various contexts. Namely, grifting for engagement online.
Most people will satisfy themselves with "Racist in the streets, Anti-Racist in the sheets".
Is there perhaps a more useful mental model than either? I'd say it's the paranoid libertarian's "If they can, they are; treat every gun as if it is loaded" pessimistic model of human behavior. It's clear that if you let people get away with criminal abuse, you get a lot more of it. It's why I'm racist against bankers. Oh wait, I should cool it with the anti-semitism.
UPDATE: It's worth noting that the Ron Unz has made the case that these integrated states/cities seem to not be the ones causing trouble. His argument is the poster child for why this "treat any gun as if its loaded" attitude works. Houston is the most diverse city in the USA and is well known for "You loot, I shoot" being the norm. Stop tolerating ninja shit like the bleeding heart yanks and it stops happening. Simple as.