My neighbor was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, the one mentioned in this article who came back with over 100 bullet holes in his helicopter after the rescue operation: https://historynet.com/rescue-in-death-valley-with-hhm-163-t... That rescue wasn't to retrieve a pilot, but nearly 200 surviving soldiers being overrun.
It's difficult to squeeze stories out of him, mostly because it was so long ago and ancient history to him. Just to put his timeline in perspective, after the war he befriended a captain of the White Russian Navy who had to flee after losing the Russian Revolution. Alot of White Russians ended up in San Francisco, which is where my neighbor settled down in the '60s. He was also a military escort for Nelson Rockefeller, I think during one Rockefeller's campaigns. Once a staunch Republican, needless to say he's not a fan of where the Republican Party has ended up since then. Still a gung-ho Marine, though, who keeps insisting on climbing over our 10-foot fence whenever he locks himself out of his house, which means I have to jump the fence. Were it anyone else I'd just call and pay for a locksmith myself, or badger him to finally give me copies of his keys.
> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995.
This seemed surprising, as it hews too close to an annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots. And it turns out to be wrong. The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Goss for the 25th edition. See https://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/cliteracy/embed... Indeed, the clitoris had been depicted in Classical medical books.
Why it was removed--and stayed removed for nearly 50 years--would make for an interesting story about mid-century culture, if not for a cynical throwaway comment, though it seems nobody knows Goss' actual motivations.
I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main.
I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if people who hear it may come to devalue people in group X. Whether it actually does or does not is another matter. In that sense, the discussion of the clitoris in an anatomy book is not offensive in the same way as the term master, but its absence is. Its inclusion could be offensive in the sense of scandalising some people who see it, but it's not the same sense.
My grandfather was a slave - he passed in 2007. I have no objection to the term master, nor have I heard anybody ever who was affected by actual slavery to take offence to the term.
I remember much debate about this, and not once was an actual affected person mentioned who took offence.
1. My whole point was that it is not about anyone in the affected group taking offence. The question is whether other people can come to devalue people in the affected group. In this context "offensive" doesn't mean taking offence, but devaluing. To take and extreme and controved example, if I tell a subordinate that the women on our team were "diversity hires" who did not deserve to be hired, the harm is not in a woman hearing I said that. It is done even if none of the women on the team ever know I said that. Similarly, it doesn't matter if the women on our team all agreed with that statement and weren't offended by it.
2. I make absolutely no claim about the effectiveness of using or avoiding certain terms even in the relevant context. I'm only saying that people misunderstand what "offensive" means in this context. It means things that may make some people think less of others, whether or not those others know about it or are offended by it.
I cannot own the perspectives and unspoken histories of other people, nor will I try. Trying to do so ultimately only results in shades of self-censorship or poor imitation.
Instead I will do my best to balance my language between brevity and specificity while hoping my instructions are clear, direct, and honest for the audience. Everything else is left to chance.
I have found over the years, the degree of my communication's success is left more to the particularities and desires of group thought from a given audience than from the words themselves. I come to this conclusion through numerous times of providing the same communication, verbatim, to difference audiences and watching the wildly differing results.
If I lived by commission I suspect I would alter my behavior. Instead, I manage a software team for a living.
I wasn't trying to suggest how individuals should behave nor claim that language has a large impact on social dynamics in general. I'm merely saying that in the context of cultural criticism the thing that is sometimes referred to as "offensive language" doesn't mean language that may insult or offend the sensiblities of those who hear it but language that may seem to make those who hear it think less of others. I don't know if this is useful or silly, but that is what it means.
Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
The severity of harm is highly subjective, though I do agree with you about the harm. The more important thing is the intent, which completely underscores that severity.
Main is also an easier name for beginners. I’m old school and always got the comparison of master branch to master tapes and such things, but people new to this stuff wouldn’t necessarily have the same intuition about the name. Main is just clearer (for now). Similar to blacklist/whitelist. I had no context for either of those and it took me soooooo long to remember what they meant. Allowlist/denylist is just so much clearer. Any reduction in harm, however tiny, is a nice bonus to just making things clearer for more people
No, blacklist and whitelist are far superior because blacklist is a normal English word. It isn't even a term of art, programmers just adopted a word that already existed in the English language (and used whitelist by way of analogy). The argument that the new terms are better holds no water whatsoever. The old terms were superior.
How is "allowlist" or "denylist" not more clear to, say, someone for whom English is a second language?
Sure blacklist was already an English word, but it's not necessarily _common_, and the distinction between blacklist and whitelist is kinda arbitrary. If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Allowlist and denylist are clearer, in that the meaning is in more clear alignment with the words it's made up of.
The old terms just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it.
The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.
The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.
Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.
A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.
(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)
Thank you for sharing the etymology! It's quite interesting, I agree!
I may have been a bit too pithy/I sufficiently clear with that last statement I made.
I meant it in the sense that understanding the word relies on a lot of contextual/colloquial/cultural understanding that's typically gained via time and exposure. At least, more of it than allow/deny requires.
Imagine an alien culture encountering blacklist vs Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to translate, because Deny is used a lot more consistently.
My argument is mainly one about _clarity_, not hurt feelings.
To me (where English is a second language), Allowlist and denylist seem unclearer. Is it a block list, a exclude list, or a permission list? Allow/deny would lead me to the last one, as in authenticate users who has some permissions but not others.
Blacklist and whitelist would be closer to include/exclude, so the replacement would be a includelist and excludelist, or include/exclude as shorthand.
I feel like a permission list is kind of a superset of a block list and an exclude list. Or they're all different perspectives/solutions to the same kind of problem, that a permission list is the more generalizable solution for.
Or it's a way of framing the problem that doesn't embed the "exclusion" idea in the naming.
And it kinda bridges over to the idea of Access Control Lists a bit better?
Allowlist/Denylist are clear and perhaps more specific, but blacklist/whitelist are not arbitrary, they're just using black in valid ways according to common English dictionaries, which is similar to how other languages use the word black, but it is less specific.
> If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Simply because black means different things depending on the context. Evil, invisible, mysterious, absence of light, sinister. It's not arbitrary because that's how the word black is commonly used.
I'm not trying to argue about validity here, but rather that these definitions/meanings of the word black are not "primary" definitions but secondary meanings based on that contextual/cultural/colloquial use. Arbitrary in the sense that that "commonality" is arbitrary and cultural, and language could just have easily developed to flip the colloquial definition.
Contrasted against using words where the Primary definition is the one that matters.
Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to understand the meaning, because "Deny" has a single pretty consistent definition.
> Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist.
Seems like it's just another step in developing one's language skills, no more or less ambiguous than "deny" for someone who doesn't know either word, but I'd wager than "black" would probably be encountered earlier in the vocab training list. It's a bit of a stretch, imo. "Reject" or "Turn-away" or "Block" works too, as well as many others, language is flexible, it doesn't seem names for lists are worth so much energy.
This master tape thing didn't even cross my mind. subversion used trunk. git used master which sounded way better for me. End of story. They're just words, non-native words for me.
As for whitelist and blacklist, I don't remember having any difficulties with them. Maybe on the first encounter, but that's it.
It's not even "was", that movement still exists. People are still out there trying to remove terms of art on the basis of the theoretical offense felt by an extreme minority of people. It's ridiculous.
It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.
I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.
I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.
Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.
But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.
> Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.
Back in the Aughts a large number of home-schooling and educational reform organizations (leaning heavily on the Fundamentalist side of the Christian spectrum) had apparently determined that Set Theory originated in Socialist / Bisexual circles.
"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.
Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.
It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.
There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)
The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms.
While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.
I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.
I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.
The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice.
EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.
Isn't type 1a circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood, but not other parts) very rare? At least that's what the Wikipedia article claims, referencing a 2008 WHO report.
This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.)
Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa:
The second link of the four is a response to the last.
I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity.
To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.
If this actually worked, you'd think there would be at least a few women without the cultural connection who get it done just for that purpose.
This sounds like the same sort of bullshit used to promote male circumcision. How about we just stop performing unnecessary surgery on our children? If someone wants to mess with their own junk, they can do it when they become an adult.
So, you admit you have no evidence supporting your bizarre claims, and aren't defending a practice you claimed was at least sometimes without negative connotations. Gotcha.
My comment about negative connotations was referring to oral sex, where it was claimed the local culture never viewed performing oral sex on women as emasculating, but something men were expect to do. Genital modification itself has to some extent negative connotations everywhere these days, if only because of the influence of Western media, but that has also given rise to a reactionary dynamic that tries to defend these practices using the language of contemporary Western morality, e.g. sex positivity.
I don't particularly agree with the OP but from my European pov, male circumcision doesn't seem to have negative connotations, certainly not in the US.
Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
What? That practice is absolutely terrible. Many people just have no idea about it, and then their offspring might grow up with terrible shame or something if they ever learn what was taken from them.
Alcohol is also terrible. Nicotine is terrible. Even caffeine can be terrible if you become too dependent on it without realizing. Harm reduction is a thing that can make things less terrible but most users don't practice it. That's the real terror IMO.
> Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
This is just legal vs illegal. Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population
> Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population
Give it a break. Nothing isolates "neurodivergent" people from the rest of society faster than treating neurotypical people as a morally inferior out-group.
I don't know where you got inferiority from that, but it's a well-documented phenomenon that autistic people are more likely to go against the norm than non-autistic people. It's called "positive non-conformity". This suggests non-autistic people are more likely than autistic people to accept how things are and perpetuate it.
While I have many autistic friends from abusive living situations that were forced to accept how things were, I find that the autistic people I meet still tend to be much more varied than the non-autistic. Though I don't know for sure whether this is a side effect of their neurotype or of their societal treatment.
Your first 2 paragraphs missing the point that negative connotations are not the same as actually negative.
My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
Do we have different understandings of what connotation means? I would say in most of the western population having a glass of wine in the evening would be seen neutrally. Having a joint less so. I'm not saying having a joint is bad. But connotations are about the unspoken things, I'm not saying it, it's inserted by people based on their biases.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
> Your first 2 paragraphs missing the point that negative connotations are not the same as actually negative.
> My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
It certainly has negative connotations for me. But, if you are saying it does not have negative connotations in general because it is still widely practiced rather than widely condemned, then I would be inclined to agree. But the wording of your comment implied there is essentially no contest whatsoever, which is why I wrote to clarify that IME it's only "most" people who don't have an opinion on it (or maybe even support it), and that I and many I know do have strong opinions against it.
> I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
That is absolutely not how e.g. the war on drugs started. For example, LSD can be fairly safe when used responsibly (and basically won't directly kill you), however when the wrong people were having fun with it, it was made illegal to target them. I don't think "society" made this determination; just the then-president. Research into psychedelics is finally starting to carve out specific paths to limited legalization, but I honestly think that safe psychedelics should be OTC, and harm reduction should be an encouraged practice, rather than sort of black-market knowledge that is only discoverable by the savviest users.
> Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
Honestly it was mostly aimed at my friend group. I've found it difficult to connect with non-autistics because I primarily deal well with explicit logic. It could be that similar intellects are just formatted differently, but I've been unable to tell if a lack of struggle / lack of awareness of struggle actually equates to comparable skill because I can't seem to interrogate them properly. They're all-but inscrutable to me. And as far as I know, they're the source of most of the surface-level generally-accepted stereotypes that quickly break down or are flat-out wrong. I don't know that they're inferior in any way, but they rarely seem to have anything interesting for me (as that would usually make them neurodivergent).
They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is.
It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs.
So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately.
If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression.
You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.
pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely.
This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true.
The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted.
> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots
This sounds like a strawman to me but I’m not well versed in feminism. Do you have examples? On the topic of science, isn’t the criticism more that women were largely ignored or misrepresented in scientific studies? This doesn’t have to be because the authors were “idiots”.
Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction.
The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".
Sadly, the environmental lobby in California would never allow a substantial amount of land to be fully returned to the tribes. From the article,
> Access and collaborative agreements — and sometimes even land return agreements — come with requirements specifying what tribes can and cannot do with the land. Many require navigating sometimes tricky relationships with land managers who may have different priorities. It’s a ways off from tribes outright holding their homelands as sovereign nations, with the freedom to take care of the land as they see fit; however, these agreements can also help support tribes that do not yet have the capacity to single-handedly manage hundreds or thousands of acres.
When push comes to shove, too many (arguably most) on the left will choose to recapitulate the methods of the "white supremacists" they claim to abhor. Of course, in their mind its because their predecessors had evil intentions, while theirs are pure. But that generally wasn't true--for the most part, albeit with plenty of exceptions, people have always screwed over Native Americans with what they believed were good intentions. The fundamental problem has been substituting their own judgement about what's best for Native Americans, and that judgement will inescapably be self-serving, reflecting their own priorities and expectations.
If people really wanted to right the wrongs of the past, just transfer the land. If the tribe wants to turn it into a nuclear waste dump, or pave it over with asphalt, so be it. Anything else is just the same old oppression, updated to reflect modern mores of the majority. Once upon a time it was about "helping" them integrate with schooling and work programs, whether they wanted to or not; now it's "helping" them steward the land, whether they want to or not. Of course, today plenty of Native American activists do want to steward the land for the cause of environmentalism; but 100+ years ago plenty of Native Americans activists wanted to pursue integration. But when there's no real choice in the matter, it's not really an exercise in granting liberty and autonomy, and history will not look any more kindly on today's flavor of imposed progressivism then it does on yesterday's imposed progressivism.
That linked opinion overstates the case. In the real-world, two different programs performing any non-trivial but functionally identical task will look substantially dissimilar in their source code, and that dissimilarity will carry over to the compiled binary, meaning what was expressive (if anything) is largely preserved. To the extent two different programs do end up with identical code, then that aspect was likely primarily functional and non-copyrightable, or at least the expressive character didn't carry over to the binary. Ordering and naming of APIs in source code can be expressive, and that indeed is often lost (literally or at least the expressive character) during the compilation process, but there are other expressive aspects to software programing that will be preserved and protected in the binary form.
IMO, your intuition regarding AI is right--it's not a magic copyright laundering machine, and AFAIU courts have very quickly agreed that infringement is occurring. But in copyright law establishing infringement (or the possibility of infringement) is the easy, straight-forward part. Copyright infringement liability is a much more complex question. Transformative uses in particular are a Fair Use, and Fair Use is technically treated as an affirmative defense to infringement.[1] If something is Fair Use, infringement is effectively presumed. But Fair Uses are typically very fact-intensive questions, and unlike the case with search engines I'm not sure we'll get to the point where there's a well-defined fence protecting "AI".
[1] There's a scholarly pedantic debate about whether Fair Use is properly a "defense", rather than "exception" to infringement, but it walks and talks like a defense in the sense that the defendant has the burden of proving Fair Use after the plaintiff has established infringement. There's a similarly pedantic (though slightly more substantive) debate in criminal law regarding affirmative defenses. But the very term "affirmative defense" was coined to recognize and avoid these pedantic debates.
Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-M
Big firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit.
I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?
The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.
The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.
namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.
That makes no sense to me. Why would I spend millions times, dunno how many do you need for a guaranteed kill for an S-400, if you could spend hundreds of thousands on cheaper ways to kill the same S-400, while the S-400 still defends itself with millions worth of its own missiles?
That's precisely what Ukraine was/is doing and has developed. The West provided lots of military support, including the US of course, but way not enough as we can see now play out in even the US itself vs. Iran. They developed cheap drones that can shoot down cheaper Shaheds. Shaheds that are way too cheap to use regular interceptors for. But even cheaper drones tip the scales back.
Why would I want to waste Tomahawks 1:1 vs. S-400 interceptors, if I can kill it with a much cheaper drone swarm?
Not saying those precise conditions/weapons exist today. I have no idea. But if they did, why would I still waste my high cost weapons.
Agreed. Start with the low cost munitions in a zergling rush. Maybe it gets through, maybe it does not, but the defenders will still have to expend their interceptors. Only if the low cost stuff proves ineffective, follow-on with the better equipment.
Because your low cost weapons will be intercepted by their low cost weapons.
The enemy gets a say in your plans, and is much more likely to have low cost weapons available then high cost ones.
The interceptor for a SHAHED is a quadcopter which doesn't need to fly as far or carry as much payload. Anyone can build this.
The interceptor for an Iskander ballistic missile is a Patriot interceptor: literally nothing else can successfully stop it reliably. Only the US can build this.
If your attacking systems are cheap, then the enemy can field just as many: Russia has a lot of drones in Ukraine now too, they were just playing catch up.
"The next war" won't have surprise drones as a problem, it'll have highly developed and optimized drone and counter drone systems.
Not quite the scenario from my parent. They said "high cost weapons taking out air defenses". Whatever the US equivalent of an Iskander would be (I used a Tomahawk as an example), the S-400 (i.e. Patriot "equivalent") would be used to defend against it at first/in his scenario.
If you want to turn it around, sure. Let's see how you'd want to take out a Patriot: high cost weapons, like an Iskander might try it? Costs about as much as a Tomahawk? Would need multiple ones, because the Patriot would defend itself against even multiple ones? But the Patriots cost as much and you want multiple interceptors for each Iskander sent its way?
What if I could send, for less money/resources, a drone swarm that also takes out the Patriot or at least expends more money/resources in interceptors shot from it, than I had to spend on the drone swarm?
I totally agree, it's "just a race". If I build an offensive drone swarm for $x, which is less than your high cost interceptors, you better build an "anti drone whatever thingie" (which might be anti-drone drone swarms) that's even cheaper.
But, thanks, essentially you're agreeing with me: Don't use your high cost stuff to take out SAMs and then use cheap drones. Instead, use cheaper stuff to swarm it out of existence. Just gotta be faster at being cheaper. Doesn't matter if you're the attacker or defender.
"what if I just had a better system with no downsides or logistical costs that was also cheaper".
In reality: Ukraine reliably downs Shaheds using a mix of low cost technologies.
They mostly can't defend against ballistic missiles without high cost interceptors.
The Shaheds could do a lot of damage to the Patriot site if they could hit it...but they never get anywhere near it. That's the point: your low cost system does not have the capability to threaten the high cost one.
And in all this you've forgotten that attacking the SAM site is only being done to enable other operational objectives. The Patriot battery is defending targets many times it's value, including the logistics and launch sites of all those low cost defensive systems - or the logistics and launch sites of your own low cost offensive systems.
To the article: the Tomahawk missile costs about $2 million per shot. Assuming this article is true, the missile in question gives you maybe a 20:1 cost advantage...but can it do the same mission? Does it have the same range, or targeting, or precision? If you cannot fire these from the same range as a tomahawk, or they don't realiably hit targets, then they can be substantially worse for a much higher logistics cost to deploy (perhaps total: the truck blowing up because you had to drive it to the front line is rather a problem).
I think in recent conflicts we are also seeing the opposite - low-cost munitions and drones can be deployed in such large numbers that they exhaust existing supplies of interceptors, and since those interceptors are more expensive than the munitions they're intercepting and cannot be replenished as quickly, they can force resource exhaustion and compete disproportionally in the economic and supply line domain of warfare.
This is a classic "you show up prepared for the last war"
That scandal exacerbated the problem, but there would still be a severe shortage had it never happened. The core issues, pay and grueling hours, predate that scandal by decades.
> ..Uh... From my understanding, a court declaring a statute unconstitutional basically makes the statute in question retroactively never a law.
It's not that simple. Even decisions on constitutionality do not always have retroactive effect, especially in criminal law where the court has an excessive fear of prisoners swamping the legal system with appeals and petitions.
> Precedent isn't something that only happens once you hit the Supreme Court.
No, but binding precedent is something only appellate courts can set, not trial courts, and it only binds courts under their jurisdiction. As a practical matter, overcoming qualified immunity at a minimum requires binding precedent, though theoretically it doesn't require any court precedent at all.
> Qualified Immunity basically gives the Executive one reusable get out of jail free card.
Qualified Immunity sets a very high bar. For one thing, it requires precedent to be "clearly established". Individual binding appellate decisions do not necessarily (or even usually) meet that bar, even with cases with identical facts in the same jurisdiction. Moreover, the officer must have "fair notice", meaning that even when the precedent is clear, if it's case law that doesn't get much media buzz or discussion among officers, qualified immunity might still apply. Generally speaking, it's really only SCOTUS cases, given their nationwide jurisdiction and high profile, that reliably clear the bar, but even then not always.
> Now, why we don't use it more, that's a lawyer question. I'm just an idiot who read a legal research book once.
You're probably thinking of 42 U.S. Code § 1983 civil actions. This was a Civil War Reconstruction statute that permits people to sue state officers, overriding state laws protecting them from suit. But it doesn't permit people to sue federal officers. There are various federal statutes granting rights to sue federal officers, but they're much more restrictive and narrower. In fact, in most of the recent ICE cases, I don't think the question of Qualified Immunity even arises; the relevant federal statutes either don't grant a right to sue ICE officers, or don't grant the right to sue them for the particular violations that occur. IIRC, most of these broader federal claims statutes only permit suits for property damage, etc, not for violations of civil liberties.
> So, foreign-made consumer routers can still be sold, but they are going to look at them with a fine-tooth comb, and they are going to use FCC approval as leverage to try to increase domestic manufacturing.
You're assuming a non-partisan technocratic process, which this administration has amply shown is neither capable nor willing to provide. This requirement becomes another opportunity for Pay-to-Play, either in cash or quid pro quo, to the government directly (see, e.g., NVidia and AMD export allowances) or to Trump's inner circle (see, e.g., crypto venture regulation, merger approvals).
This is the problem with erosion of norms. We’ve all known for decades that consumer routers have shit security. We’ve all known about the risk of implants or intentional backdoors in the supply chain. And now when the FCC appears to be finally doing something about it, there’s a massive cloud of mistrust hanging over the whole idea.
The mistrust comes from those doing it, and the clearly corrupt ways they are operating. The maggot movement is basically rooted in a lot of very real frustrations from very real longstanding problems, but the only thing it offers as solutions is performative vice signalling.
People who care about the problems of digital security are not going to lean into the idea of simply banning devices based on where they were manufactured. Rather they would work at general standards and solutions to actually solve the problems - things like untying the markets for hardware/firmware/services, requiring firmware source escrow, mandating LAN protocols and controllers so every single IoT device isn't backhauling to its own mothership, and so on.
Likewise people who care about domestic manufacturing first and foremost are not going to champion applying steep blanket tariffs two decades after all of that industry has already left, or using regulatory agencies to shake down manufacturers for unrelated concessions.
> DESPITE natural cycles and successful efforts to reduce it (aerosol ban).
Aerosols have on balance negative radiative forcing, so the increased warming is partly because of reductions in anthropogenic aerosol emissions. This effect was anticipated, at least by scientists, if not policymakers and activists.
It's difficult to squeeze stories out of him, mostly because it was so long ago and ancient history to him. Just to put his timeline in perspective, after the war he befriended a captain of the White Russian Navy who had to flee after losing the Russian Revolution. Alot of White Russians ended up in San Francisco, which is where my neighbor settled down in the '60s. He was also a military escort for Nelson Rockefeller, I think during one Rockefeller's campaigns. Once a staunch Republican, needless to say he's not a fan of where the Republican Party has ended up since then. Still a gung-ho Marine, though, who keeps insisting on climbing over our 10-foot fence whenever he locks himself out of his house, which means I have to jump the fence. Were it anyone else I'd just call and pay for a locksmith myself, or badger him to finally give me copies of his keys.
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