What I said was that Europe would prefer that Russia attack it rather than Ukraine.

That’s an insane thing to say, both on it’s face and based on the last four years of Europeans very strategically avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.

Then the combined forces of Europe would be able to defeat Russia.

Napoleon on line 1. Hitler on line 2. They are both eager to discuss what you have in mind.

The UK and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland

It wasn’t theirs to give. The Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, a country that didn’t even exist until 1918. It was full of Austro-Hungarians who were some of the first foreigners to explicitly align with Nazi Germany.

The UK and France weren’t in a position to stop him, any more than they were in a position to stop the proto-fascist war hero Gabriele Annunzio and a rogue force of Italian mutineers from seizing the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919.

Might as well claim Obama gave Putin Crimea. Or that Bush gave him South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Donbus had similar problems. It was populated by a large number of Russian nationals who were getting propaganda pumped into their brains from across the border. That was kicking off domestic insurgency, which Ukrainian nationalists were eager to squash.

Europeans had neither skin in the game nor influence in the region. All they were willing to do is send mercenaries and cheap military equipment over the border. And we know how that worked out.

Nobody wanted an all out war with Russia.

Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s

I mean, if you’re talking about IQ, you’re misreading those statistics. It’s not the Intelligence that’s been going down. It’s the Quotient that’s been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That’s in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.

how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?

I don’t think the “ruling elites” have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don’t think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they’re trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they’re thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.

That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than “Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins” is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they’re doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.

If there’s an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it’s top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.

They want to fuck and exploit you

So did the Cave Man. But we’re so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we’re just getting dragged along behind them.

Without context for the numbers or their significance, this seems like another “AAH! Education Panic!” bit of discourse.

Pretty obvious the big hit happened during COVID and now we’re in a long hangover period. But absent more meat on the bone than “Number was 500 and now it’s 460”. What’s the useful takeaway from this information? Other than to just express more generic Doomerist sentiments in the comments? Hard to say.

Also might be worth asking, if the numbers had gone up instead of down, would anyone here be celebrating? Would it have even been posted? Case in point:

The Test-Optional Paradox: Why Published SAT Scores Keep Rising Even as Fewer Students Submit Them

Is this something we should be happy about or sad about?

Nope wasn’t that good

Modern journalism is just sixty part-time reporters standing around a photocopier.

I still believe we let Pearl Harbor happen to drum up support for entering the war.

It’s certainly possible FDR was warned of the Japanese attack in advance. But we didn’t have a Pacific Fleet capable of repelling them. Moving what we had to Pearl Harbor was an effort to improve our (generally weak) Pacific naval capacity and establish a forward operating base in anticipation of an attack in the Philippines. Not coincidentally, Japan took the Philippines the day after Pearl Harbor.

Also, this was already two years into WW2 and four years into the Sino-Japanese War (where we’d been backing the KMT against Japanese encroachment since the 1920s). Nothing like 9/11, unless you want to claim we’d been at war with a continent-spanning Islamic industrialized military since the late 90s.

Also, plus, further, too, the 9/11 attacks were calculated by Bin Laden as an explicit provocation intended to draw the US into a quagmire war in Afghanistan. Which… it did! Maybe didn’t go down exactly the way he planned, as the US dicked around in Afghanistan far longer than the Russians managed before their government collapsed. But if 9/11 is the Pearl Harbor to this analogy, it’s akin to saying Tojo wanted the US Navy to exhaust itself in the Pacific over the next twenty years. Let’s not forget that Bush didn’t want a war with Afghanistan. He was focused on Iraq and Iran. Afghanistan was a massive distraction.

And all of this hinges in a world in which FDR knew about the highly secretive Japanese navy movements in advance decades before we had the B-2 spy plane much less satellite surveillance. All to score a… media victory? In a country where FDR’s post-Depression government already had a heavy collar on the national press to the point that he was doing highly rated nightly podcasts to a national audience?

It’s a pure apples/oranges comparison.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu used the flypaper theory in that the French attempted to draw the Viet Minh into attacking Dien Bien Phu where the French thought they could destroy them.

But they failed. And their defeat was so horrifying for the French public that the government lost its civilian support and was forced to withdraw from Indochina as a result.

If Ukraine is Europe’s Dien Bien Phu, that doesn’t look good for the Europeans.

War between Europe and Russia would be destructive but Europe has to decide a solution to Russia’s hybrid war against it.

I have no idea how Russia and the rest of Europe can reconcile after the last decade of relational decay. But I have to assume there’s some path back to peace that doesn’t run through a Ukraine-style missile exchange that stretches all the way to the Atlantic. There’s no world in which Moscow trading ballistics with Berlin, Paris, and London ends better for humanity than one without it.

The country would “take all necessary measures to defend its sovereignty”

What a fucking joke. Saudi Arabia hasn’t been a sovereign nation since the Six-Day War.

Getting into Berghain with a doctor’s note.

if you think Cheney wasn’t above letting a few thousand citizens die for massive defense spending

The two flights that hit the Twin Towers were as unexpected as anything we’ve experienced since Pearl Harbor. I don’t think Cheney “allowed” them through. I think the national bureaucracy was sloppy and failed to catch the hijacking before it happened.

Meanwhile, Flight 93 was very likely shot down and then covered up.

Republicans were going to get a massive defense spending bill passed one way or another. Dems are always happy to roll over and “Support the Troops” when push comes to shove. It’s a stretch to say Cheney slow-rolled the response to a terrorist attack for the money. But very easy to believe he and Bush fumbled the response because they were bad at their actual administrative jobs. But then they spun the fuck-up into a cash grab months after the fact, because they’re very good at that sort of thing.

The job market isn’t nearly as bad as the job-seeking process. Hiring managers don’t actually know what they want or what their businesses need done. Software is so hyper-specific and skills so conditional that you either needed to be onboarded straight out of college or get incredibly lucky in your job rotation to land on the one critical bit of information all the demand revolves around. Automated tools and services ingest a ton of spam that HR still needs to sift through. Recruiters are as happy to lure away your staff as help you find new people.

The jobs are out there. But it’s an absolute fucking mess to find them.

Singapore is six multi-nationals in a municipal trench coat. Why would anyone be surprised when their chief executive gets his lily gilded just like every other business aristocrat?

“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” is a President’s Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency that was given to U.S. president George W. Bush on Monday, August 6, 2001. The brief warned, 36 days before the September 11 attacks, of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, including “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for a hijacking” of U.S. aircraft.

I’ve never heard of this community before today

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7741

Per the language of the legislation itself

“Pornography is vulgar, candid, cynical, obscene depiction of sexual acts, pursuing no other goal, the explicit demonstration of genitals, unethical elements of the sexual act, sexual perversions, realistic sketches that do not meet moral criteria and offend honor and dignity of the human by inciting low instincts.”

So this appears to be a relic of the '00s culture war, spilling into Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu is a better example of the Flypaper Strategy

I don’t think that works, as the “Flypaper” in this analogy would be better defined as the WW1 Central Powers.

Ukraine/Russia has much more in common with the European theaters of the World Wars (or the Napoleonic Wars) than the anti-colonial rebellions in their aftermath.

Actually, it would be better to attract Russia to attack Europe where it could be destroyed by the combined European armies

People keep floating this conflict as A) inevitable and B) decisively favoring Europe. But I cannot imagine a world in which any of the central European countries emerge from the conflict without suffering enormously.

Nobody actually wins in this kind of exchange.

Pushing on an open door.

You’ve got away too many bigots in these institutions who are more than happy to sell their colleagues, their patients, and their country down the river to sate their own bigoted impulses.

What are you? Some kind of Communist?

Obviously it went down because of the holiday.

AIs need days off too