I do think that military doctrine produces some of the most appalling writing known to man, I don't know if it's related to cop-speak, the way that simple things need to be dressed up in bizarrely indirect neologisms, or if the military just doesn't select for good writers.
The classic example of combining direct and indirect kinetic lethal fires to present the enemy with a dilemma holds true but is no longer sufficient. Most enemy forces will have multiple options, not just two. Multiple enemy courses of action must be confronted with multiple friendly capabilities so that his reaction, any reaction, will expose a critical vulnerability to a friendly capability.
Combined arms dilemmas must be created in depth. Enemies can choose a course of action, come what may, and “push through” a dilemma presented by one of our arms. If this is the case, his reward must be another layer of dilemma presented by still another capability.
I don't want you pushing through the dilemma presented by one of my arms, so I'm going to expose another layer of your critical vulnerability to my friendly capability
There’s definitely a lot of “don’t say you’re killing people“ going on.
I wouldn't say that we're killing people exactly, just presenting them with multidimensional dilemmas across a range of active theatres that reduce their capacity for effective operations by blowing their heads clean off their shoulders
speaking of combined arms doctrines, I am loving this one:
To that end, the Marine Corps employs force with organic or supporting arms down to the lowest level, but future fights demand an expansion of the arms available to those units at the tactical edge. Combined arms across five dimensions means using all available means to confront the enemy with multi-faceted, reinforcing, and rapidly-shifting dilemmas at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels in order to shatter his cohesion, corrupt his decisionmaking, and increase his friction.
I feel that if I confronted units at the tactical edge with multi-faceted, reinforcing, and rapidly-shifting five dimensional arms it would certainly shatter my cohesion and increase my friction, yes
before the invasion made it clear that the Russian ability to project military force could best be described as "shambolic" there was a lot of big talk reminiscent of Devereaux's "Fremen Mirage" posts (which I keep thinking of as The Fremen Mystique...) in which the Russian army is a formidable fighting force honed by the brutal environment in which they live (because it's cold? poor? vodka soaked? unclear), while the riches of the Decadent West lead it to field armies of effeminate men (and nonbinary men) who are too busy having gay sex / doing the housework while their wives have lesbian sex, picking out exotic new neopronouns, and transing their gender to do anything useful like developing effective anti-tank weapons or efficient logistics or combined arms tactical doctrines etc.
obviously this is nonsense! but it's surprisingly compelling nonsense given the frequency with which it comes up.
Not surprisingly compelling at all, since of course they've been saying things like this since the time of Herodotus.
Hard times create weak institutions, weak institutions create logistical failures, logistical failures create hard times,
the thing is it's not about the Uyghurs: they're getting the same deal as the Han and other ethnicities get in terms of constraining birthrates, submission to the party, conformance with dictates on language and religion, participation in the market economy, etc. as anyone who tries to join an underground church or stick to a non-standard dialect or communicate with people overseas will quickly find out.
so the usefulness of the Uyghur angle is that it's perceived as new, which allows existing issues with Chinese governance that were swept under the carpet from Clinton onwards during the gung ho globalisation era to be repackaged as a Holocaust-lite story of ethnic conflict instead of the boring old authoritarian hamfistedness we've known since forever.
which brings it back to a clash between two systems that ultimately can't be resolved by logic alone as it hinges on which moral axioms you adopt; one side might bang on about individual rights, the other might point to a million dead in the invasion of Iraq and half a million dead from a viral pandemic and ask what exactly do those rights get you in practice, and the debate continues.
and of course beneath that it's not actually ideologies and abstract systems of governance that are competing but states made up of concrete institutions and specific people responding to local incentives, and the stories that they tell each other and themselves to explain what is going on are only a small part of why they're doing what they do.
it's very similar to the way that it's not about Hong Kong, I mean there's no rights deserved by the people of Hong Kong that aren't also deserved by the people of Guangzhou, just because historical contingencies put them on opposite sides of a border until 2046 doesn't mean there's any fundamental difference between them, and while using Hong Kong as a rallying call for a broader geopolitical conflict makes obvious sense it's also misleading taken in isolation, just a stand in for a broader clash of values and/or institutions.
one possible improvement might be if rule of law was also law of rule so to speak, if there was a higher degree of policy indirection between decree and outcome, keyed off specific metrics that were regularly reviewed.
for example under the current system you might levy a 10% sales tax, then some years hence you might raise that tax to 12.5%, or you might carve out various exemptions or whatever, all of these changes will have supporters who stand to benefit from them and opponents who stand to lose, and the result will be determined by the usual coalition building and political horse trading.
an alternative would be to legislate an algorithm for determining the sales tax rate, which might take into account various budgetary or economic factors, and then run that algorithm each year.
(by "algorithm" I mean a brief prose description of a mathematical process, not the machine learning monstrosities that seek to usurp that name).
the tax rate would then change automatically according to the criteria already agreed upon, and those criteria could be revised over time if necessary, a much higher level discussion of "the tax should be keyed to wage growth / inflation / whatever" vs. "the tax rate should be 15% / no it should be 17%".
legislating in the form of higher level processes and rules requires defending them more explicitly in terms of economic models and observable metrics, leaving them more open to challenge if reality turns out to differ from the specification.
(fixed policies can also lead you off a cliff, so such an approach would probably work better with a parliamentary system capable of rebooting them if necessary and not the American constitutional gridlock mishmash, obviously).
the principal agent problem is a real bitch in the way that it interferes with optimal human flourishing even at large scales, like obviously a despot who fears being strung up by the mob would rather sacrifice economic growth to avoid this fate, but even an elected leader will gladly trade away economic growth for the chance of winning another election: the personal benefits of a longer career in politics for one person outweighing the compounding benefits to humanity as a whole!
now you might say that a government that is democratically elected by the people will represent their interests, but that's obviously false: it puts a lower limit on how little it can represent their interests without getting replaced, but the effectiveness of the political cartel at preserving itself means that limit is much lower in practice than we would prefer.
changes that would materially benefit millions of people in general are a lot easier to make if they would also benefit one person in particular, but it's challenging to arrange the incentives that way.
some like to claim that autocracy or even monarchy would be better at this, freeing the leadership from needing to worry about petty electoral concerns they could devote themselves to the betterment of the nation as a whole, but this is obviously rubbish: the inability to remove them by peaceful means leaves them acutely vulnerable to revolt or even assassination, the prevention of which consumes a great deal of energy at the expense of everything else.
market based solutions for effective governance have been mooted but seem too riddled with contradictions to get off the ground.
as a result we languish!
when your hair is wild enough that brushing it only makes it angry
it’s always annoying to cut the last two slices of cheese, it would be convenient if someone could devise a continuous cheese extrusion system that would approximate a cheese block of infinite length to avoid this problem
who should I speak to about this, who is the big cheese of big cheese
giant entirely capable of moving quickly, lumbers around taking slow heavy swings at the heroes because he knows that’s what they expect and he’s eager to please
conservatives be like society has progressed beyond the need for progress
we’ve been making movies about computer games being real for 35 years
TRON (1982) The Last StarFighter (1984)
aisandetsarepeopletoo
And who could forget the classic Spy Kids 3: Game Over (2003)?
who amongst us indeed
Cloak & Dagger (1984)
they even released a game to tie-in with the movie!
40 years of movies about video games
Anonymous asked:
"someone whose job description is “cum inspector”" haha, just like in homestuck!
yo mister white this is just like in homestuck
JESSE what are you TALKING about—
perhaps the worst problems are those for which the solution is obvious but unpalatable, so you’re stuck knowing you should do it, unable to bring yourself to do it, and resenting yourself for not doing it.
the problem is a stalemate in Ukraine would give both sides an incentive to come to terms, but a Ukrainian counteroffensive gives both sides an incentive to prolong the fight for a better position, at great cost.
You’ll notice the West is very carefully not sending them offensive weapons like tanks, attack helicopters, heavy artillery and such? Won’t even send fighters, at least as long as their current air force is doing unreasonably well.
yeah, all the missiles they're getting are only really useful for defending yourself if you're being attacked by some asshole with lots of vehicles and planes who is trying to hold dozens of your towns, I don't think they can use them to make serious gains in open battle to push the Russians back over the border.
they did okay with HIMARS smashing Russian logistics but yeah the offensives stalled for months waiting for more tanks and air power
CONCEPT: A universe which, if there are any inhabitants at all, necessarily has an overall net negative utility, but where increasing the number of people increases overall utility asymptotically towards some level which is still far below 0, so that, assuming extinction is impossible, it always makes more sense to create new people even if you’re bringing them into a desperately unhappy world, because of the benefits to everyone else. And of course, the more people there are, the less possible extinction becomes, locking you more and more into the path of unhappiness.
you mean our current universe?
that’s someone’s mother you’re talking about, someone’s daughter, someone’s filthy little meme slut,