(((Asa Zernik)))

To be fair, he's been a defense attorney for a lot longer than he was a prosecutor. The face turn was a WHILE ago.

Maturity is accepting that none of the cool sci-fi things would be practical for an actual military even if they were technologically possible. A mech is just a tank that needs more cover and has more complex maintenance.

There is a problem with people confusing procedural (bipartisanship etc.), policy, and aesthetic moderation. Buttigieg is an aesthetic moderate but a pretty consistent partisan, while someone like Sanders is a policy and aesthetic radical (within US politics) but a procedural moderate

This is true, except for on Tumblr, and we should have been able to learn from that place’s mistakes

My unified theory of political discourse centers around the fact that the quote post was invented in 2015

I'm not sure I would call them mercenaries; more, if your military-serving class expects too much compensation you can't have a very big military.

People who only just learned about lesswrong from a podcast or blog post about the zizians: getting a real zizians vibe from this lesswrong link

Sometimes politics is about the little things

I was told not to teach a class on the intellectual histories of Zionism and Anti-Zionism next year - not because they doubted I could teach it fairly, but because it would attract too many politicians scrutinizing the syllabus.

A society where that is a valid fear is no longer fully democratic.

cf the Israeli overfocus on air power, and deemphasis of line infantry and armor, that conventional wisdom here now blames for the October 7 fiasco: air power and airborne infantry were the only arms that got flexed for a decade or more, so everything else atrophied.

For modern *high-intensity* warfare, sure. But for most of the last generation the US has been in a series of low-intensity wars or propping up foreign proxies, where SOF are specifically useful. Overadaptation to a mission that isn't the core "big conventional wars" one.

It’s pretty emblematic of today’s US Army, if you didn’t go to jump school, Ranger school, or some kind of SOF course, people question whether you were really “in” the Army at all, thus a whole bunch of officers who could be helpful self select out

We could also consider it a variation of the “selection-destruction cycle” advanced by the military sociologist Roger Beaumont in his seminal 1974 study of military elites.5 As Beaumont points out, one defining feature of specialized elite forces (mountain troops, rangers, special forces, elite light infantry, aircrew, submariners, and so on) is that they tend to select from the best available personnel—choosing fitter, more intelligent recruits with better leadership skills, initiative, and endurance than ordinary units do.6 They may even (as in Australian, British, and American special operations forces) recruit primarily from existing members of high-readiness units who themselves are already highly trained and subject to rigorous selection. But as Beaumont shows in a comprehensive study of twentieth-century elites, such forces also tend to have higher loss rates—they operate at the upper end of the stress bell curve. They are thrown into dangerous or demanding missions, experience higher than

don't mind me, just military sociology posting

So Curtis Yarvin sucks intensely but he hasn't wielded any actual power and I have no impression he has broken any laws - being a sick, monstrous idiot being entirely legal - it is the majesty of liberal democracy that he has nothing to fear.

He ought to ponder that, but won't.

Out of curiosity - what did this Macedonian/Greek soldier class *do* with all that silver, if the economy was so poorly monetized?

Oh is *that* the unsettling-yet-compelling energy I felt when playing that game. Seems so obvious now.

Doing my part to bust epistmeic bubbles: looks like the the school district did in fact fuck up vetting and he was legitimately here without legal status and had been lying about background for a while. Not exactly a threat to public order or anything, but still.

Yes on measure 50 ballot

Hey Californian- don’t forget to vote YES ON 50

(and to call @governor.ca.gov to bully into into signing SB79)

Chat, is it good when the judge you're in front of says "you're an officer of the court" and "you're a lawyer" multiple times within a few minutes?

The Macedonians in Egypt AFAIU did get land grants, but they *also* expected to be paid for service. Ptolemy I just anchored the expected terms at too generous a level; European medieval vassalship, AFAIU, generally came with the expectation that landed lords would pay their own and retinues' way.

In particular he seems to really grok the Gulf Arabs, with their conspicuous consumption and conspicuous corruption.

Contrary to the spin of Netanyahu’s boosters in Israel and the fulmination of anti-Semites in America, Trump has never been beholden to Netanyahu. The reverse is true: Netanyahu has been beholden to Trump. For years, the Israeli leader has marketed himself to voters as the Trump whisperer and presented his alliance with the mercurial American president as an electoral asset. Netanyahu even festooned buildings with photos of himself with Trump on towering campaign posters across Israel. But these boasts have now become a straitjacket. With Israeli elections scheduled for late 2026—and possibly arriving earlier—the prime minister cannot afford a public feud with the president without refuting his own electoral argument. This means Netanyahu not only has to accept Trump’s diktats; he has to spin them as his own ideas—or risk shattering the myth he has built around himself. The president fully grasps this dynamic. “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory,’” Trump told the Axios reporter Barak Ravid on Saturday. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.” The president’s official rapid-response team then posted that quote on social media, in case anyone had missed the implication.

Trump has not only compelled Netanyahu’s recent about-face on Gaza. Over the past six months, he has forced Netanyahu to abort a major counterstrike in Iran; publicly declared, “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” dashing the aspirations of the Israeli settler right; negotiated the release of an American hostage from Hamas behind Netanyahu’s back; and made the Israeli leader apologize to Qatar for his recent strike there—after which the White House released a humiliating photo of Netanyahu’s phone call of contrition. This week, he signed an executive order granting NATO-level security guarantees to Qatar, the longtime hosts and patrons of the Hamas leadership abroad. Trump has also repeatedly amplified and praised the Israelis protesting against the Netanyahu government and in favor of a hostage deal.

It's pretty clear who's the boss in the Trump-Netanyahu relationship.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Because the Israeli half of that is two-staters, and despite official agnosticism on one vs two states in practice the BDS Movement sees any two state advocates as Zionist and therefore bad.

I increasingly think the subreddit model is the best conceptual way to structure a social media platform, even if actually existing Reddit I’m pretty meh about. You gotta let people enforce their own community norms, but those norms have to be opt-in

His *actual* job is Minister of Finance, which he does seriously. He was also hoping to be basically Minister of the IDF in the West Bank, but the more professional Ministers of Defense (for personal power reasons) and the IDF (because they don't want to juggle two civilian superiors) nixed that.

Note that it's actually "Additional Minister in the Ministry of Defense". Because reasons. bsky.app/profile/asaz...

Chaverim. Beloveds. Don't interact with Bad Empanada

He was banned from Twitter years ago after he called for the murder of Israeli children. He regularly denies that antisemitism exists.

This is not someone you debate, this is not someone you platform to your followers. This is someone you block.

It's quite good. Show gets rough third season (network cancellation drama intervened) but recovered for seasons 4 onward.

Books are also good; much more consistent, but don't IMO reach the highs of the show.

if i wanted to watch a bunch of people cry and pretend someone hurt them for points i have soccer tyvm

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