iamthey
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Blog Comments posted by iamthey
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Best wishes, on your surgery, and whatever else may follow as you work through this. Having cancer survivors in the family, it can be a rough ride, but the right support makes all the difference. You'll be in my thoughts, and I hope to hear of your success in beating it.
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This is kind of amazing.
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"Treaty chess" and tighter coalition warfare are a byproduct of the limited shared interest of not losing (or losing as badly) by controlling the unfolding of the war and responding to the other side's attempt to exercise such control.
As with anything political alliances that participate in coalitions and cooperate with them should evaluate what is asked of them and determine whether or not such requests are reasonable or serve their best interest. As others have said, one has no real obligation to a coalition, its an open political association, but failing to collaborate (and simply "letting the chips fall as they may") might also make your participation mechanical and predictable such that the opposition in turn gains the opportunity to control your involvement.
There may be a fine line between following a sound strategy and being a pawn, but refusing to participate in the politics of war doesn't necessarily safeguard you from either.
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So you are saying STILL that nobody in your coalition gave one iota of thought to "perspective vs reality"... Lets be clear, I do not believe you. I do no believe you based on conversations I had mid-war with VIPs on all fronts. But lets say you are right... your entire leadership was filled with morons if you are right. TOP (pun intended) to bottom, your coalition was filled with idiots for leaders (if you are right)... Either way.. if I am right, or if you are right, you deserve to be right where you are, either through duplicity or incompetence.
Your statement was vague so I'll do my best to respond to it. IRON's diplomatic missteps were their own to make and they are responsible for them. Their incompetence during that war has little to do with the rest of us- nor should it reflect poorly on the rest of the participants.
In terms of targeting, IRON volunteered for the CnG front, they refused GATO as a target, and TLR was settled on at their preference. That IRON took flack for this was not part of our calculation, or something we particularly cared about. It was IRON's job to consider such things and IRON apparently didn't. That they didn't follow through in that front and allowed 90% of your alliance to get to peace also reflects poorly on them and further contributed to the flack they got form our side (mainly from the people that were fighting along side them). So here I would affirm your false alternative yes IRON in this instance was either staffed by fools, or was completely duplicitous (to honesty both sides of the war). In either case they were not set up to fail, they chose to fail.
In terms of LoSS again this was a matter of helping an alliance affiliated with the coalition to avoid an uncomfortable diplomatic situation. The problem was raised for discussion it floated around and ultimately it was executed without a real go ahead. IRON's characteristic absence on IRC ended up screwing them here as they failed to contribute to the discussion- they failed to make their own particular interests well known and they failed to weigh in. IRON's response was impulsive, it was rightly criticized, but it blew over after they had reaffirmed their affiliation. They were not here set up to fail, they were simply not around, and because of that the state of their unique situation was not part of the conversation.
IRON was one alliance among many, each with their own treaties and each with their own interests to balance, that IRON failed to be attentive and make their challenges known is something they themselves are to blame for. You said it yourself several years ago before EQ: IRON as an alliance is systematically incapable of taking responsibility for their mistakes, they are pathologically reactive, and they blame others before examining themselves. You were right then, and I was wrong. Their behavior in that war, and their narrative after are simply one more item in that catalog you started.
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You're welcome.
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Seriously... your coalition did... or it allowed people to... take EVERY single shot that could possibly be taken at IRON. TLR defending an IRON ally? We will ask IRON to hit them. Seriously.. did NOBODY think there would be fallout? We(TLR) did not even NEED the coverage. If ANYONE in your coalition were looking out for IRON, they would not have been asked to make that DoW. An IRON ally SQUARELY in the Platysphere (VE) signs an eleventh hour ODP with LoSS just to let LoSS take a potshot at NG(another IRON ally).. and not one Einstein in your coalition said "umm, maybe we should not prod IRON so openly." Your Coalition was working 2 angles. Accomplishing the task at hand, and setting up IRON for post-war isolation. If you deny that this was be design, you insult the intelligence of every living , breathing ruler on Planet Bob that has 2 brain cells to rub together. These were no "unfortunate sets of circumstances"... they were moves that were NOT needed , they lent not one iota of ease to your coalition victory... they had but ONE point. The miscalculation that everyone would cut IRON loose is why you guys are where you are now. Now you will reply to this, and be a good soldier and say "There was no design at work here, we were just locked into a series of unfortunate events." Fortunately, most of us here play CN and not Lemony Snicketts.
TLR wasn't the alliance IRON was originally supposed to fight. They were supposed to fight GATO but threw a fit over the prospect of fighting GATO's upper tier. TLR was a compromise that IRON chose and insisted upon.
LoSS was rushed in because they were concerned they would end up getting pulled in by the otherside. The decision to put them on NG was made spur of the moment by people who had little to do with the macro-management of the coalition itself. IRON's response (threatening to counter LoSS) was handled and resolved through a negotiation where NG mad an ass of itself and IRON ultimately opted to continue to prefer its allies among the coalition and its commitment to the coalition.
To broadly respond to your point though, you're giving way too much credit to the architects of that coalition. It was as surprising and baffling to us that IRON fared so badly in the war as it probably was to IRON. You're of course free to reject this, but know that I myself would much prefer to believe it was a huge conspiracy and have little to gain at this point from blowing smoke up anyone's ass. History is just never quite that interesting.
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I forgot nothing. In fact, it was a MISTAKE for them not to do it. Why? Because the setup was so damned obvious. Why SHOULD they help those who want to kill them, set them up TO kill them? Considering backstabbing the entire coalition was not only the ONE thing they did right, they should have followed through.
It wasn't so much a set up as it was IRON preferring one set of its allies over the other and making a conscious choice. Valhalla and VE were both invested in the coalition, and IRON had just burned its bridge with NPO. NG was probably then seen as the unfortunate alliance who just didn't quite fit into a largely workable group. IRON was well received and I don't think the negative !@#$ really began until the war itself started and bickering over distribution of forces and coverage began.
I don't think IRON really anticipated planb making the choice they did, and I don't think they expected NG to react as vehemently as they proved to. I imagine IRON thought they would slide through the war quietly without an incident as historically they haven't been a great nexus of public attention. That IRON came out of that war in such poor shape is more attributable to key resignations in their government (prior to the war), and just plain mishandling of certain key moments. In short a very bad accident. By the end of the war I think IRON basically felt they had nothing to lose and this fueled a cycle of bad decision making that culminated in the almost side change.
That being said, I think the error you make in your assessment of them is to attribute their success to diplomatic handiwork on their part when in fact it has more to do with the strategic thinking of those who ultimately chose to keep their ties to IRON. Non-Grata and GloF both deserve credit for their thoughtful decision to maintain a treaty, and for their foresight in betting long on IRON rather than short. Where IRON is really due credit is in the strength of their macro. IRON's internals are and have always been extremely impressive, this year it was their stats that saved them, and for that they owe most of their current fortune to people like samus.
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F is for fabulous.
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Rational argument requires common objective standards, and our standards of discourse collapsed quite some time ago. If the world was rigidly legalist, we could make complicated elawyer arguments over the finer points of treaties. If there was a commonly held morality we could argue about that in rational terms. We have neither.
The closest thing we have is debate over the effectiveness of a given strategy, or if this or that will drive people out, but even then there's something lacking in that.
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I know you would never intend this, but to me this seems a lot like the promotion of democratic ideas? I'm not sure if I can know your intentions, but I do know that public appeals of this sort often instill or at least propose a consensus.
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I generally enter a discussion under the assumption that we're both mostly wrong.
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Poetic, revolutionary even. You should start an alliance.
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Leave putin out of this. Putin is a great man.
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What ought one do when faced with a paradox such as this?
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This is the double-edged sword. Those actions in years past raised the stakes significantly; they also likely drove plenty of players away. But so too does the profound political malaise that has settled in. Reverting to the way things were might kill the game...doing things in the fashion that have prevailed since Bipolar will just kill it more gradually.
Objectively our reaction was probably too far in the opposite direction. Its clear that game breaking peace terms have a negative impact, but to shift purely to the model of universal white peace was probably itself unnecessary. Of course I also think there really hasn't been a cohesive enough political entity that is large enough to actually enforce reps since PB went the way of the dust. Coalitions have been centralized and organized enough, but they have been collaborations with heterogeneous internal objectives. For something other than what we've seen you really need a long status quo, which we haven't had.
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So basically...
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I am unable to take you or anything you say seriously at all.
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thanks for clearing that up
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*Twily munches on some barn hay, and glances over at braeburn*
Well nothing to see here.
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I enjoy your work as always Vladimir.
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To be fair both the mentally disturbed and enraged are inevitable byproducts of civilization. Just as it is unproductive to blame a storm for the damage it causes, to be surprised when one of these little apes, born into a world it is ill suited to, boils over in frustration is also rather silly. Either way though we don't know what the answer is quite yet, in fact I imagine there is no definitive answer on gun control and that different approaches must be taken for differing societies.
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Fair enough King Wally. I suppose my response to that would just be, the loss of life is what they would call in economics a sunk cost; so in the sense that it is a loss it shouldn't have any bearing on future decisions, and in the sense that it represents historical data it needs to be considered in light of the full body in which it is a part. As human beings we can all shed tears in mourning the dead, but as decision makers those who decide our fate are obliged to be more than human. In confronting the question of the future we must be focused on minimizing harm and producing optimal social conditions, not avenging the dead or honoring them with adjustments to law. People will always die and such tragedies will never realistically be eliminated from the space of possibility- a more realizable objective is to simply minimize the scope and impact of violent crime at which point we can be satisfied we have done all that we can. Simply put one horrible event is not a motivation for change, only a trend is, and even when that trend is clear the question then is "what change?".
That being said, no I wouldn't tell a parent of one of those kids this, but because it is crass not because it isn't true. Who knows what the impact of an AR-15 ban would have been, maybe those kids wouldn't have died, but maybe 30 other productive educated adults would have somewhere else in the US over multiple other events. The question of if anyone 'needs' one is immaterial to the question of what the impact of not having AR-15's scattered amidst the population is. If societies are anything they are complex organisms almost as capricious and counter intuitive as the weather. Until that relationship is understood and until we actually endeavor to understand that relationship any action by the state would be nothing short of gross negligence on the part of the responsible authorities.
That is the essence of my position and I think it is really analogically related to all of policy making here in the US (and really the west in general). We are a blind intoxicated people behind the controls of a very large piece of heavy machinery that just happens to be located in the center of a bustling metropolis. We're infantile enough to think what we're doing is simple and we are myopic enough not to see the mayhem we wrought.
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Enjoy the world you live in buddy. Lucky for me my kids can go to a school that isn't surrounded by people that own AR-15 bushmasters, Semi-Auto handguns with extended clips and so forth. Most I need to worry about is the odd rogue Magpie swooping them on the way out the gate.
Oh and home protection is a metal rod... funny hey... but thats really all you need.
There are other options out there mate you just need to be willing to action them and not half ass it like will probably happen in the end.
Who are you responding to king wally?
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They never get resolved as polititans are 99% focused on getting elected and 1% focused on what they really feel is right. Pro-Guns gets you elected in America just like anti-refugee gets you elected in australia. Both are sad realities.
And the statistical evidence is overwhelming. America sadly suffers about as many gun related deaths a week as countries like the UK or Australia do a year. Hell most UK police officers no longer even need to carry guns... something which I find crazy. The Aussie police were in the paper just the other day asking if they could get a handfull of AR15 style rifles spread across the entire country for critical response units. Something your average US suburban block probably already has stored in their cupboards. Come on man that must paint a picture for you.
I couldn't really care less what politicians do or what their motivations are- your first point has nothing to do with the matter at hand, nor the ambiguous nature of the evidence. As for your second point lovely, the UK and Australia have restrictive gun control and have peaceful societies, pointing this out proves nothing. The relationship between firearm ownership and violent crime is not simple causality, its a non-linear and dynamic relationship which factors in not just quantity of guns owned, but also demographic factors, the cultural backdrop, existing criminality, economic conditions, prohibitive drug regimes, micro-political elements and so on and so forth. Just as it would be absurd to say gun related deaths in iraq are in any way related to their stance on gun control, it is similarly absurd to imply that america's problem with murder is singularly a function of its liberal stance on firearms. That is a completely bankrupt position, and the fact that people even think something like that is anything more than sophistry is a glaring indication of just how superficial western and especially american political discourse is.
That being said to what ambiguity do I refer? When the first 1968 Gun Control Act was passed by the English Parliament Homicides were 6 per million people. After this the high was 1995 when Homicides were at 13 per million. In 1997 they passed another gun control act and homicides per million was at 11, in 2001 it was 15, in 2003 it was also 15. In 2002 in spite of 34 years of gun control in england there was a school shooting. For that year the uncorrected homicide rate per million was 18. In 1987 there was a large gun related massacre. In 1996 there was a school shooting. In 2010 there was another shooting spree. My point being England may be overall a pretty peaceful society but its laws have not spared it sprees like this one, nor have they actually reduced population neutral homicide rates. That doesn't mean gun control isn't necessarily a good thing for other reasons, nor a non-factor in reducing crime- it just means the role played by guns and by gun control laws is at this time not fully understood and generally unclear. Also FYI on the british laws, the pre 1997 laws allowed for gun ownership with very restrictive licensing, post 1997 laws required surrender of almost all firearms to authorities.
Another interesting case study is washington DC. Washington DC is quite interesting because it highlights ambiguity as to what the impact of gun control or its removal entailed. Of course in the US homicides are measured in per 100,000 not per million but I would argue that causes for this nation wide phenomenon extend far beyond simple gun ownership as even pre-gun ban England (when their laws were similar to ours) was never nearly as violent as the United States. Moreover there are many areas in the US (higher-middle income/educated demographic centers) where homicides can be measured on comparable scales to England and Australia. That being said in 1976 when Washington DC passed its handgun ban the homicide rate per 100,000 was 29. After the ban the local maxes were 1980 (35), 1992 (80), 1994 (77), and 1996 (75). After this violent plateau in the 1990s homicides dropped without any clear relation to the 34 year old laws to a low of 30 per 100,000 in 2005. In 2007 the 1976 law was struck down by the supreme court and homicide rates continued to drop. Again the drop in homicide clearly has nothing to do with the repeal of the gun laws, but it also clearly has nothing to do with their presence as homicide spiked despite the law. The results of this experiment were inconclusive and again this is just another case where the role played by a prohibitive firearm regime is unclear. As a general reference point during this period the nationwide high of homicides per 100,000 was 10 in 1972, 1980 and 1994.
Another interesting case is Chicago. In 1981 they outlawed handguns, at this point the rate was 29 per 100,000. Immediately after the ban there was a drop in homicides to 22 per 100,000. After this there was a spike in 1991 through 1995 of 34 and 35 homicides per 100,000. After the 90's Chicago followed the national trend and saw a reduction in crime. The results here clearly have nothing to do with gun control and in fact there is a much more compelling case (freakonomics) that the drop in crime is related to the legalization of abortion in the US. Again ambiguous. One other interesting statistic from Chicago though is the percentage of murders committed with a gun, from 1991 to 2007 the percentage has steadily increased not decreased despite the handgun ban.
Now I concede neither Chicago nor Washington represent nationwide bans so conceivably you could just leave the city to purchase a gun, but that requires pre-medition, intent to break the law, and generally the sort of mindset that precludes prohibition from having an individual impact. Just as history has shown that nationwide bans cannot stop the exceptional cases, indeed a city ban cannot accomplish this either, no real surprise there. That being said they highlight other interesting contrasts such as their own homicide rates with the national moving average. What makes these cities special comparable to others, certainly there are more factors in play than just the general liberality of the legal regime?
Here is my source for the last three paragraphs. There are some other interesting things in there such as an account of the Floridian, and Texan legal shift away from prohibition which saw a significant reduction in homicide.
As for Australia, indeed homicides have dropped, and violent crime in general has dropped. Again though Australia was never nearly as violent as the US to begin with, and they haven't exactly banned firearms- on the contrary they simply appear to be somewhat more restrictive (often requiring a probationary period or a 'reason' among which are collecting, hunting, and target practice) comparable to those of the US excluding a general ban on Assault weapons which are not really even the focus of gun related crime to begin with. So again I think the relationship is at best ambiguous.
As I said though, I am not saying there are no good reasons to ban guns, or that conceivably there isn't a relationship between gun liberality and violent crime, I'm just saying those reasons are unclear and that the relationship, assuming there is one, is a lot more complex than the linear function it is often framed as. When we assume gun control is a silver bullet or cure all we simplify what should be a much more holistic approach to the problem of criminality and homicide. I think our tendency to this sort of over reduction has a lot to do with the deficiencies of our political system and the inability of actors to triangulate and balance multiple policy objectives simultaneously. Everything has to be reduced because only such atomic issues can be processed by the system at any one time. The framework of our society also tends to inhibition and inflexibility in problem solving. Perhaps gun control alone does nothing, but maybe gun control with a very invasive police force, or gun control paired with gentrification, or gun control with with an income threshold, or mandatory gun ownership by a particular segment of the population and restriction on another would produce optimal results. The problem is we have already made a decision that most of those alternatives are unacceptable for reasons prior to the effects and now we are saddled with a binary decision: of whether anyone should have guns or not. This I would say is rather foolish.
That being said one could argue that gun control instead of having an independent impact could possibly have a potentiating effect or act as constants in a power function, that is it exacerbates whatever current tendencies there are. If a society is generally non-violent then perhaps gun control will enhance this passivity- by contrast a violent society deprived of legal arms may result in more criminality- this is by no means necessarily a superior model, but my point is we have no good working model to begin with. If we want to make good law then we need a more scientific approach to policy making because what we have now is more akin to the walk of a drunk man, than the movement of a rational being.
Why Do We Have a Yearly World War?
in A Captain&Coke with L_H
A blog by Lord Hitchcock in General
Posted
Generally speaking I think there is a strong case to be made for the mechanics argument people have offered. That to rebuild and to grow a little more requires roughly 6-8 months. Long wars are often similarly explained in terms of time it takes to make a meaningful impact (mostly the time it takes to really damage a warchest and reduce tech levels).
I think there's also a strong case to be made for just the timescale of our politics. We've had longer stretches between major conflicts, but overall it's a balance between the risk of going too early and the risk of waiting too long. Wars are important times of transition when consensus is built (or destroyed) and alliances assess who they want to work with and who they don't. Usually the target of the next war is also staged during a current one. If you wait too long to act on that previous work you risk that consensus going stale. Essentially you signal to your friends that "you don't want this war", and you introduce uncertainty into the structure of your allies. When everyone knows who is getting rolled, they can feel confident and certain that it's not themselves, when no such presumption exists the political model starts to fall apart and people begin to look around for safe bets (which might not include you). If you go to early you expend energy organizing people for a war they aren't necessarily 'ready' for, you waste political capital, perhaps you alienate people, and you have to invest yourself into then locking down the war after that. Managing these risks seems to be what drives the cycle of war and peace here. This assumes of course that you're one of the few alliances that has a real say in when a war starts though.
On the other side of the coin, alliances that participate in wars but don't really manage them: the game is more about finding safe harbors, not making yourself a target, and lobbying up the food chain to ensure you're on the right side and not left out to dry. Alliances in this position usually also don't want war to be more frequent as its transitional nature leaves them more vulnerable.
So we usually end up waiting a while between wars. Hoping for a new era where they are shorter and more frequent (or balanced) is honestly not worth the energy- wars are too costly not to do a thorough job, and they're too risky to be 'fair'. The goal isn't to settle a disagreement, but to cripple your opponent and put a nice lead between them and yourself. You can't make wars short and proportional to an offense if the offense doesn't matter, and the war must be total if it's fought like it is: purely to maintain advantage or out of spite. In so far CB's are just an excuse to get things going, it's hard to imagine an enemy not coming for you unless you break them first.