mozz

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn't make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what's going to happen to you in response. That's at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers' naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it's not like that's new. Once it does go past the level of "we don't want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we're scared of the response," and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They're hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It's not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn't necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.

There are places in the world with no government. Africa has lots of them; that's probably the best place to travel to if you want a much more immediate and easy and possible-in-the-first-place path to get there than the total non starter idea of destroying the US government. Central and South America have some too, in selected places, but it's less complete or widespread than it is in Africa. You could literally be living your dream in like a few weeks from now.

Actually I think there are also some crypto based attempts at doing something like that (like floating ships or islands or something), and they'd carry a lot of benefit in terms of the people speaking English and being supportive of your worldview and all, but they have worked even worse than the land-based places with no government, if you can believe it.

If you just meant you want the nice things about the US and its government, without either the destructive things that it does alongside or the obligations that have to happen in order for it to exist and do those nice things, me too! It'd be great. Maybe when you go to Africa you can get to work on making that system. Let me know when you get done and in the meantime I'll be here with my clean water and highways and taxes garbage collection and anti-bear-attraction regulations and military and all.

Sure. My question is, why such a concerted effort to look for bad things about such a clear win?

Like would it work the other way? If the IRS was making life more difficult and expensive for everyone making W2 income under $79k, would you be out here saying well I guess an L is an L, but let’s remember it only applies to W2 earners and only some of them and anyway it’ll probably get overturned later on and I want to highlight the program’s important limitations and etc etc, instead of just saying “that’s a bad thing” like a normal person?

So you think it's a good thing, just doesn't go far enough / needs to be extended further in the same direction in the future?

The truth is, I have no idea and I don't think it's all that productive in most cases to try to sort it out or talk about it. I didn't actually say anything at all about what the person was; I simply highlighted flaws in their argument and linked to one of their other comments and let the reader draw their own conclusions. In this case I think they were so self explanatory that I didn't really need to indicate any of what my conclusions were.

But... to deal explicitly with my conclusions, I'll say that in almost every case where there's some kind of weird nonsense-logic, and then poking through the person's history instantly yields some "let's not vote for Biden" advocacy, I do personally tend to draw the conclusion that they're a political shill. If I saw a bunch of geopolitical stuff or extended arguments about Marxism then that would tilt the scales in favor of tankie (although like I say, this is only my private logic about it, not like anything I would present as conclusive, because it's basically impossible to tell.) Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn't strike me as real common tankie behavior.

I looked back in my history as an exercise in self criticism, and I found many many recent instances of me arguing with people I'm pretty sure are shills without bringing that accusation into it in any capacity, because usually, it's not relevant and I think just dealing with their arguments at face value is more productive. And then, I found a comment from a few days ago where I called the Biden administration "fuckin assholes" about their support for Israel.

I won't say that back further ago than that, you won't be able to find me accusing someone of being a shill, because you will. I will say something about it in cases like this where it's (a) hilariously obvious and (b) relevant to the conversation on a level that makes bringing it up productive, in addition to dealing factually with what they're saying. But I actually don't say it nearly as often as I think it. I won't speak for how anyone else likes to do their internet arguments, but just as far as my conduct is concerned I'm pretty sure you're just making up a convenient reality that doesn't exist. Both of your main accusations here have nothing to do with the actual reality that exists in the real world.

I'm not sure why you're committed to saying something "rebuttal-like" here, instead of just "yeah that guy's full of shit" without any "but" attached afterwards, athough I have a theory.

(Also, this conversational pattern -- where one person who is pretty clearly a shill expresses a statement, and someone does a rebuttal, and then the first person disappears completely and someone different instantly jumps in and starts conducting the conversation or attacking the rebutter -- happens often enough and is slightly-unusual enough that I think that pattern is worth pointing out, also.)

So I thought to myself, well that's a weird comment. It's nonsensical in a couple of different ways.

1. Creating a program that does something good that wasn't there before doesn't somehow become a bad thing if there are ways in which it doesn't do enough. Almost every real action which takes place in the real world represents some kind of imperfect step towards an ideal future, not like a "we got it perfect the first time and every single nook and cranny of the objective is satisfied by this, the first attempt we made to improve things."
2. People who draw mostly W2 income actually aren't "destitute" necessarily. I don't even know where the connection came from. Most people who are struggling in life have simple taxes. Most people who are doing well have complicated taxes this doesn't apply to. Your complaint, even taking the rest of it at face value and using some un-addressed population as a reason not to address things for the 140,000 people in the pilot program or however many millions will be addressed by this second phase, is backwards.

So I sort of wondered to myself: Why would someone be so aggressively negative in this specific way about something that almost any normal human being would look at and say "hey that's good," and for such weird and counterlogical reasons?

And so I looked three comments back in your history and said oooooohhhhhhhh okay I get it it all makes sense now.

As I am every time, I am genuinely baffled about who these people are.

Are they propaganda bots? Confused Westerners who have chosen the world’s weirdest “team” to be on and support uncritically (or been driven there by the very real shittiness of the Western system in some respects)? People from communist countries who are trying to cope? Trolls? Parody accounts? Something else?

I think that a lot of them are #2. But it just seems so weird and tragic all of them getting together every day on the internet to tell each other how awesome North Korea is. I am very curious to be able to sit down and have a face to face conversation with one and just see what’s in there.

And as always, you decide that I've said something I haven't.

You talked about “the party” that was supposed to be fighting fascism. It honestly hadn’t even occurred to me to designate some other group of people who were “supposed to” accomplish it on my behalf. My point was, we should be fighting fascism. You and me. I think it’s silly to pick out someone else who’s “supposed to” be doing it, although, yes, it is true that anyone else should also be “supposed to” be doing it too. But more, I was viewing it as a personal task and responsibility, and I thought it was silly and passive to turn that whole thing into a reason to whine about the Democrats (although there is one specific sense in which it’s completely justified which I address in my second paragraph).

Now that I’ve explained a little more fully does that sound more ok? I was exaggerating a little to lampoon what sounded like your central message because it’s boring if I just lay out what my specific disagreement is with what you said. I mean it’s definitely boring on my side for me to lay out for the 200th time why I disagree with some conversation that all of a sudden for no organic reason at all turned into “and that’s why the Democrats are bad!” out of nowhere.

They didn't stop in 2016.

Student loan forgiveness 40% emissions reduction NLRB corporate tax increases

We might have some disagreement because you could describe that all as “incrementalism” and say that Biden’s no good unless he’s willing to overthrow capitalism or use his magic wand to get congress go agree to the massive things that would have needed to happen to overcome 40+ years of neoliberal betrayal. I think the fact that he was able to accomplish it at all with Washington the way it is is a feckin miracle.

To me, the issue with the Democrats, that laid the groundwork for Trump, wasn’t “incrementalism” or too slow progress in the right direction. It was shittiness and active movement in the wrong direction. Biden’s not guilty of that, so I didn’t accuse him of it. If the Democrats since 1992 had been doing incrementalism, we might have some kind of country that is even in the neighborhood as good as it was in 1992, and it wasn’t real great in 1992.

So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.

If there’s one thing Milton Mayer keeps coming back to, it’s how it was all the fault of the establishment German political parties of the early 1930s for not being more motivating of people to vote for them, and no one on an individual level needs to do anything until they do first. He keeps harping on that central point: If a dangerous political movement arises in your country, it’s okay to hang out and wait and not resist it until the alternative is sufficiently awesome for your tastes. It’s pretty much the central theme of his whole book.

(I mean, honestly, I don’t disagree with you that the general crappiness of most of the Democrats from about 1992 up to and including 2016 laid some abundant groundwork for the rise of Trump. That doesn’t mean it is safe for anyone in the world to let Trump come to power again this year.)

And we have a hell of a lot better system for fighting back than the Germans did. And a lot better precedent to shed light on why to resist it. And, the Nazis were famously sort of clownish and incompetent especially in the early days but compared with Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell they were fuckin Seal Team 6.

If the MAGA folks bring fascism for real to the US, it will be the Americans’ fault that they let it happen.