CarmineCatboy [he/him]

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  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2022

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  • It’s obvious they don’t trust any of the Chinese Americans

    That’s why they can’t spy on China anymore.

    The golden rule of espionage is that your enemy is gonna spy on you as well. So it’s incumbent on you to go on the offensive and spy even harder.

    The kind of person who can spy on China or, say, the Soviet Union speaks the local language, and has economic and political ties with local assets. Both the spy and the assets are gonna play a double game if for no other reason than the fact that they can make more money that way.

    The US played that game well all throught the Cold War. And it chose to lose the capability to do so after the Aldritch Ames Incident. The americans have gone on the defensive, and are more focused on ensuring the enemy can’t spy on them at all. As a result the espionage officers can’t be perfect for the job - hiring a well connected person is too much of a risk - and the espionage assets aren’t hired in the first place. What CIA agents the US had abroad were legacy agents from a more daring time. And all those guys were purged when the Iranians found a security breach in the american intelligence networks, got the informants’ names and sent the list to Russia and China.







  • Of course you’re talking about harm. We all are. It’s even in the OP: ‘vegetarians won’t eat things that caused harm to produce’. Well, that’s a generalizing statement. Do the vegetarians in question eat eggs? Quite a few do, and that’s factory farming. Do they consume animal products that purport to be from ‘free range’ farms, that in itself is a cope to be quite honest. Are they vegetarians for religious reasons? Then there’s a lot of variety there. And then there’s the world of crafts, as every single inch of a cow is used in industries other than the food industry. The idea of abstaining from animal products is always tied, somehow, to harm reduction. Even in a spiritual sense.

    The parallel to IP breaches is, frankly, not very convincing at all. Not eating an egg because it comes from a tortured chicken has very little to do with wether downloading a movie hurts the studio’s bottomline. The consensus is that piracy is a service issue because IP monopolies are not breached by literal theft. Not every pirated download is a prospective client. Many plain don’t have the money to pay the tithe. Many others plainly just pirate to test and then buy it anyways. Others still will download cracked games because of the damaging software that comes with the paid versions.

    Regardless, as I said, even if you estabilish a parallel between abstaining from animal products to boycotting entertainment then that parallel only strengthes the retort. Just as a vegan abstains from anything related to factory farming, a person might refuse to studios who take a deleterious ideological stance with their money. Ultimately, the only thing that binds these two worlds together is the idea of ‘voting with their wallet’, which actually strengthens the vegan position. This I say as someone who actually does eat meat.



  • It’s a global issue that affects every highly educated society. And it’s been decade after decade of governments bribing their populations to try and get them to have children. It failed every time. The economic strategy of people who live in post industrial urban centers is just not compatible with a growing population. You can of course look at it from the point of view of rising childcare costs, but that’s part of a larger social democratic project. From what I understand the american population will continue to grow via immigration and the country isn’t in a situation as dire as, say, Japan.

    Ultimately, if there’s a problem to be fixed it is the fact public and private finance will have to deleverage themselves somehow once the pyramid topples over. Widening the base is simply not going to happen.