Corvos
9hr ago
Also it’s really hard to base your PR strategy on sympathy about that one time you got horribly genocided when your government keeps unveiling flags inscribed with “YAY GENOCIDE!”
Corvos
9hr ago
They were doing fine, prior to Oct 7th. Hamas did what they did precisely because they were losing ground; Arab countries were normalising relations. What they should have done - and it's not perfect, and it would have been very hard - is put back up the fence, gritted their teeth, and carried on the way they were going.
Corvos
10hr ago
In this particular case, because America's ally Israel's opinion differs from America's and it's mucking up American diplomacy.
People like you make me want to just kill every Palestinian and Iranian to prove a point we won because we can.
Yes, but people like you make me want to defect to China. Going full psycho is not just another move you can pull out of your repertoire like you're playing blackjack and deciding whether to hit or stay. When you are in protracted legal wrangling over a breach of patent costing 10m USD, the reason you don't just pull out a gun and waste the judge, plaintiff and opposing council isn't because it won't work, it's because making it clear that you are a psycho with no switches except 'kill' and 'don't kill' acts as a strong signal to everyone else that they need to drop everything and focus on killing you now.
Case in point: all of Israel's former allies now loathe them. To the extent that there is any support for Israel remaining, it is that senior politicians manage to temporarily squeeze it out whilst avoiding increasingly bipartisan pressure from all the up-and-coming politicians. Whatever the provocation, going straight to 'kill everyone' is not a good move unless you are obviously so desperate that there is no other choice. America is very clearly not in that position.
The US hasn't been at war with anyone since 1942, and 1979 was forty seven years ago. And... look, there is no possible way you would have accepted this reasoning if Iran had shot Donald Trump at a speech or had his secretary blow him up with a briefcase bomb in 2017. No way. Which to me just makes your reasoning look like, "America gets to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime as long as we don't like them and we didn't explicitly promise not to". That's not even perfidy. Perfidy implies the possibility of honour.
Corvos
23hr ago
Except that yet again, the gap between “the US is vastly more powerful than its allies” and “US opinion is all that matters” is biting the US in the arse.
Corvos
2d ago
Trump pushes and sees if he gets pushback. I think the likelihood of taking by force was low - maybe 10% - but NATO sending troops moved it from 'yeah, could be easy, could be fun' to 'going to be a headache'.
Corvos
2d ago
Lotharios existed in every age. And doubtless so did women overeager to use them to beat all men over the head.
I don't think folk songs about Casanova and his disciples prove much about the majority of men who broadly loved, married, and procreated on schedule.
Corvos
3d ago
For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!
Not say this? For starters? Israel was actually doing pretty well with restraint and measured responses right up until Oct 7th when they (somewhat understandably but very foolishly) let Hamas provoke them into an orgy of violence that makes them look like just another band of murderous ethnic psychos.
Corvos
3d ago
I think it makes sense in the context of a) a confusing world and b) a general understanding that humans and animals are usually more comfortable in their native environment.
So e.g. nobody blinks twice if you say that humans (or tigers) need a green environment and lots of sunlight, because we evolved to expect these things. Likewise, mildly more controversial, the similar arguments made in favour of exercise and combat sports.
From there it doesn't seem inherently unreasonable to say, 'Look, you're designed to breed. You may think you would be happy with porn / in a monastery / DINKing but your brain and your body expect kids and the longer you ignore that impulse the more you're going to regret it later'.
THEN of course you get all the complications around group reproduction. Obviously you have Palestinians literally saying the battle for Palestine happens in the womb, but you also have the demographic tax pyramid where a failure to reproduce can collectively screw over your entire society. Of course it's up to people who much they care about that, but I don't think that caring more than zero is invalid.
As a biologist it seems entirely obvious to me. Biologically people are the end result of an optimisation process running many hundreds of millions of years with the sole goal of shaping you to reproduce your genes. You exist only in as far as your ancestors were able to reproduce. Your body and your mind are incredibly strongly shaped for ‘what is needed for you to reproduce’. It makes sense to call the utility function through which you were ‘designed’ your purpose, biologically speaking.
To be frank you are an educated man and know this already, and I assume your statement of bafflement is a refutation of the idea that we should care what evolution ‘intended’ for us.
To which I can only reply that my brain was shaped by these same processes and I & many others find ourselves caring regardless of whether you do.
Corvos
3d ago
Two big paradigm shifts came from China: reinforcement-learning self-training, and mixture-of-experts for LLMs.
That would seem somewhat appropriate, until they can return and rebuild with the men. Chastity shows a level of seriousness and an awareness of the sacrifices others are making.
Corvos
5d ago
I meant he was going for 2 by wearing the fedora. Better a weirdo than a weirdo who’s taken correspondence courses on how to look like a DC mover and shaker.
Corvos
5d ago
This reminds me of Scott A saying that in terms of giving a good impression:
- it’s great to be cool and charismatic and self-confident
- it’s… fine to be normal and a bit diffident and insecure
- it’s really bad to be a slightly shy and insecure person pretending to be cool and charismatic and self-confident
Corvos
5d ago
I can’t imagine that Anthropic would voluntarily sell exclusive access to the US government.
Corvos
5d ago
Speaking as someone who’s weighed up automating some processes versus hiring some manual workers to do it, there seems a world of difference between “we’d rather automate this because hiring a team will open us up to lots more compliance, plus it’ll be really inconvenient if they drop out or aren’t any good or demand more interesting work or we decide to end the project” versus hating people and wanting them to suffer.
Corvos
5d ago
In complete seriousness, I don’t think you understand the visceral worries that parents have of whether their children will do well.
Your economic analysis of what would happen to the money is correct but I know enough parents to know many are genuinely trying to do their best for their children rather than living out some pompous caricature of the PMC, and are desperately afraid their children will fall into an unhappy state.
You may think those fears are misguided but parental worry is something that it’s hard to reason away.
Corvos
7d ago
Eh, the male equivalent is the treatment of idols and people like that. Less an Anglo thing but actresses (and actors) have often been expected to comport their sex life in such a way as to not shatter the fantasies of their fans.
Elder Race is one of my favourite books and I don't recognise this description at all. There's one bit where she realises she's formally put herself in the debt of an ancient and largely incomprehensible (to her at that point) being. Since she's very sheltered and inclined to think in story plots, she wonders if this is going to be a story about how a princess got spirited away by a wizard. Nothing comes of it because he's a clinically depressed basket case who regards her as primitive, and because he's still kicking himself for totally fouling up a budding romance with her long-dead great-great-grandmother.
The plot is mostly about her growing up and getting a clue, while he reconnects with humanity. (Also realising that being a 'wizard' is much cooler than being a shut-in old man and the Ethics Committee can go hang, they’re all dead anyways.)
Israel’s enemies would certainly have been emboldened, but Israel’s friends would have been (and were) emboldened too. When you get right down to it, a fence is a fence. Oct 7th was an Israeli cock-up as much as it was a Hamas triumph and I honestly don’t think Israel had much to fear if they had just stopped sending their reservists home for the holidays.
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