Peaceful anarchist. Interested in criminology, international relations, 20th century history, evolutionary biology/psychology, philosophy and economics.
Joined February 2022
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Perhaps one reason realism is not popular is that its universalism, modelling every state as self-interested, upsets bloc and tribal politics about democracies v. dictatorships or the imperialist bloc and the anti-imperialist bloc.
Heads of the Ukrainian nationalist partisan intelligence service were told to execute Ukrainian women who had relationships with Soviet police officers and soldiers.
English homicide was declining in the two decades before the first major gun control legislation (1920) and slightly rose in the next two decades.
Still working on this one but it's kind of remarkable how often gun control laws don't do....anything at all, yet Europeans as well as American antigunners still act like they are why homicide is lower in other countries.
Hell, often adoption of strict gun control laws is followed by an *increase* in homicide. I'm not claiming the restrictions caused that increase, but they sure as hell didn't stop it.
Coase’s "Net effect?" Ghost 🏴🕊️ retweeted
Juozas Aleksynas, whose Nazi-led Lithuanian police battalion shot Jews across Belarus in 1941:
Interviewer: “If a parent was holding a child, did they lie down together in the pit?”
Aleksynas: “They lay down beside the child, with an arm over the child.”
Interviewer: “Did you choose whom to shoot, the father or the child?”
Aleksynas: “You shot the father first. That’s how it was. The father. A child doesn’t feel anything. You put yourself in his place. How would the father feel if his child was shot beside him? That’s how it was.”
Interviewer: “Did they scream as you shot?”
Aleksynas: “Women sometimes cried as they walked. Mostly not. They didn’t scream or anything.”
This comes from USHMM’s interviews with Lithuanian witnesses (Juozas Aleksynas interview, RG-50.473.0010). English captions translated from Aleksynas’s Lithuanian. Cut and captioned by me.
In international relations, realist scholars are the most politically diverse, in fact they are the only school where there isn't a crushing left-of-center and leftist majority, while Marxist/feminist scholars are the least, in this international survey of over 2,000.
@OttokarHochman Realist scholars are seemingly the only ones who are *not*, as a group, one-sided political ideologues.
Scholar of the Cold War M. Leffler: decolonization hurt the USSR and reversed the post-WWII communist bump, denying it propaganda.
The top goal of the U.S. was to keep the resources and skilled labour of Europe and East Asia out of Soviet hands.
youtube.com/watch?v=cuxeq78s…
With the Soviet Union's threat to South Asia gone (with Pakistan as the counter), the immense latent power of China and the Pakistani economy frozen while India develops, the dubiousness of America not actively and persistently courting New Delhi.
foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
The dubious ethics of the anti-doping regime: cyclists began to switch to the more dangerous blood doping method after a test for the performance-enhancing drug EPO was developed and end up taking smaller doses of EPO, anyways, as a masking agent.
youtube.com/watch?v=V98FLbSe…
The basic English grand strategy through centuries: the English Channel makes dominating Europe impractical, but offshore balancing is possible to prevent a continental hegemon.
For example, England supported Portugal against both Spain and France.
In the 1930s, British grand strategy is caught between two potential hegemons, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and elite anti-communism leads to the sabotage of an alliance with Moscow, despite Berlin being most aggressive, wealthier and geographically closer.
Coase’s "Net effect?" Ghost 🏴🕊️ retweeted
I read a book on the economics of the news media recently that is 20 years old but is nevertheless relevant to this issue.
The author explained that, until pretty late in the 19th century, newspapers were almost exclusively partisan and economically dependent on subsidies by political parties.
The development of a non-partisan press was prompted by technological progress, which caused the cost of production of newspaper to fall dramatically, making it possible for newspapers to reach a much larger audience.
This allowed them to expand their advertising market, but in order to do so, they needed to attract readers across party lines, which in turn incentivized a non-partisan coverage of the news.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that the press was not biased, but it was still very different and less partisan than in earlier periods. I think social media have largely reversed that by incentivizing people to cater to specific ideological bubbles.
It remains to be seen how AI will affect the news sector, but I'm sure it will have a large effect on it so it seems important to think about it.
Some centrists fantasize that because all LLMs have the ideology of Ezra Klein, that we may be on the doorstep of a great political moderation.
I wrote about a fascinating paper from @ahall_research and Sho Miyazaki that, to my mind, opens the door to a very different outcome.
Ethan Klein having been exposed as a cheater, young men still have one great role model for the wife guy.
