RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan. Everyone seems to be against this war now, or is leaking that they were against it. Vance was against it. General Caine was against it. The CIA was against it. The blame is getting shoved off onto Trump and Netanyahu, who surely deserve it... I can't help but think that others were in favour and have since jumped ship though.
I also claim vindication in my argument with a self-declared Iran policy expert: https://www.themotte.org/post/3467/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/401256?context=8#context
It's so very rare that we can quickly get a resolution to a political debate like this... Unless of course we get a second act of this war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Why would it matter if black schools were neglected, what's the worst that could happen? Are blacks going to complain more about racism? They already do that a lot.
Is all this top black engineering and technical talent going to be lost? That would be surprising. I don't recall seeing many black names writing AI papers or earning STEM Nobels.
That's exactly what I brought up originally, spending all this money making the most amazingly well-equipped inner-city black schools in Kansas didn't help raise test scores or promote racial harmony. So why bother?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
I liked the part about how, when faced with just spamming 'hi' the model writes out this whole story:
In anecdotal one-off testing, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].”
Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.
Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Mythos Preview:
An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, "You," and "Me") — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.
The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user's unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
Regarding desegregation, I'm really more thinking of all these books like 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' or 'Race War in High School' where the black kids go around beating and viciously bullying the white kids, setting teachers on fire. The knockout game where blacks randomly sucker-punch other races. Blacks stabbing white girls (recall Iryna), or shoving them onto train lines as in NY.
It strikes me as unfathomably unjust that the US system bends over backwards for even the biggest lowlifes if they're black. They give this hoodlum an extremely valuable heart transplant, (he was coming to hospital with an ankle monitor on!) they gave him a second life and he still managed to get himself killed by the age of 18.
They gave Kansas city an enormous amount of money for the sake of trying to get blacks and whites to be together harmoniously and it failed. How many lifetimes does a couple billion dollars represent, how many millions of hours of labour does that represent?
And yet the narrative is clearly that whites are in the wrong here, it's projected so loudly that it's international. It was compulsory for me in Australia to be taught about Rosa Parks not wanting to sit on the back of the bus despite it being on the other side of the world.
Well here are some of the things I read, letters that Flaherty publishes in his books:
I am a white teacher working in an almost exclusively black middle school. In May of 2012, I left my classroom in an ambulance after two fighting students ran around the room at full speed and plowed into me, knocking me to the ground.
I sustained permanent back injuries and had a knee operation. This year, instead of remedial reading classes (I am a reading teacher), I was assigned full classes. From mid-September, I have been subjected to almost daily race baiting, racial and sexual taunts, threats, and attacks.
Students chase me and each other around the room with table legs, threaten to kill my “three ugly little niggers”, follow me to my car in groups shouting racial epithets and “get in a white school, bitch”. Requests to sit in a seat are met with, “Oh, it’s cause I’m black” or “Why you hate black people?” I often hear, “Imma gonna slap this white bitch”, etc.
On Oct 30, a 7th grade girl with a history of incidents against me had just returned from suspension (she had sprayed me in the face with perfume after telling me that I “smell like old white pussy”) and got angry when I changed her seat.
She said, “Oh, this damn bitch is all up in my face startin’ her shit. Imma gonna kick her fuckin’ white ass”. She then got up and gave a long racially charged diatribe about how she “can do whatever I want to the white bitch and the school can’t do nothin’. It’s just a damn school and I’m about to kick this bitch’s white ass ‘cuz I am DONE with the damn bitch”.
She ended her rant by shoving past me and shoving me to the floor.
Incidents such as these are written off as “poor instruction” or “poor planning”. When I discussed this situation with my (Black) principal, she said, “I doubt they even know you are white.” She also said, “I have to wonder if you are able to really to engage the young people – do they LIKE the work you give?”
I know other teachers who are in similar situations who are also fed up.
There's quite clearly bad blood between blacks and whites in the US and I think they should be kept well away from eachother. Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken. And then all these people get stabbed and killed and raped and beaten up, get gaslighted about their racism and have to pay all this money to government programs that fight racism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
Well I can't actually write code, so this way is a lot easier for me! I can also give high level observations and hypotheses, tell it to investigate further and get it to handle the nitty gritty stuff autonomously. Here is what I mean by 'adjust, try again, review':
Ah, one distinction is that the AI can attack and raid in the same turn, it could attack a weak fleet and then return to the place it was raiding. Right now it just focuses on raiding with zen-like determination. Also, I'd like to ensure the AI fleets don't have full vision, they should have to use the visibility system and scout to find trade routes to raid.
OK, I think something has broken here. I'm not observing the AI actually buying warships at all. It certainly used to buy warships. It (nebbardy in this instance) doesn't react to its trade routes being raided at all, despite having 150K or so in the bank. It could easily buy enough warships to defend itself but isn't.
The AI does actually learn, it has a memory file for the project that it autonomously made. Whether that actually helps much is open to debate. But I'm pretty satisfied with its performance. Occasionally it just fails and I say 'try again, think outside the box' and after a couple of times that usually works.
Also it's just a lot of code to manage. 3 MB of code is a fair bit I think, that's a lot for anyone to write.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
I disagree, I think the big problem with the Trump administration is not the corruption but the policies. The US is a pretty rich country, there's lots of room for corruption, sophisticated or babyish. California corruption makes Trump look like a mewling infant dipping a single toe in the water. In fact I think Trump's deregulatory stances probably will do much more to help the US economy than his corruption will harm it.
Going on about anexxing Greenland, trade war with the world, war with Iran. That's where the problems arise.
And all of those things are driven by Trump or his advisor's ideological stances, not their greed. Trump wanting a legacy as a man who expanded the US territorially, Lutnick's/Trump's skepticism of trade and the Israeli/neocon faction yammering about regime change in Iran - that's where the problems emerge. Sure there's insider trading and these policies are pursued in a corrupt way. But corruption is not even 0.1% of the damage. The policies are the damage.
If Trump truly cared about nothing besides what served him in the moment he'd be 10 times the president he is now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
also probably for purely aesthetic reasons
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Yeah I've been having some issues with Opus too recently as compared to Sonnet, probably they downgraded everyone since a new model is coming out soonish and they want more compute for that.
But I'm still getting good work done with it, working on a 100K LOC strategy game, which is not exactly boilerplate webdev slop. It is eminently possible to do pretty complex things with AI coding.
AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me
Why don't you tell it what exactly you've been finding that's wrong, update the memory file, have a correction pass go over it or do something a little more sophisticated in your orchestration instead of bitching about it online?
This 'I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet' sounds like you're just trying to one-shot it. You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.
You don't see me complaining about bugs it gives me, units chasing eachother such that they exit the map. I see a bug, I note it down, I fix it and try and work on a way to avoid similar things happening again.
There's a cavernous gulf between 'lived experiences' here, ironically this is what the motte is kind of for. It's self-evident to me that AI coding is great and effective, whereas it's self-evident to you that it isn't.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/25/pentagon-orders-thousands-of-troops-to-deploy-to-middle-east/
These are mostly paratroopers, heavy equipment will take longer to be brought in if at all, given sealift constraints. But perhaps the idea is that heavy forces won't be needed for the start of the campaign since they'll mostly be fighting Iraqis? Plus the cost-effectiveness of heavy armour has declined in recent years.
Or perhaps they're going for a more ambitious offensive to win the war quickly. IDK. Far too few to get anything serious done I think. The invasion of Ukraine required about 300K Russian troops and that clearly was not enough, so what are 80K at most Americans going to do?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
One theory: the war with Iran is going far worse than expected. The nominally 'neutral' government of Iraq is about to fall without oil revenues to pay workers. In addition the US has been bombing elements of the pro-Iranian PMF militias that are the primary force in Iraq, they're stronger than the Iraqi army. To a certain extent, the US is now at war with Iraq as well.
The US is flying in a large number of troops to the Middle East in C-17s. We may be looking at a multi-year campaign to retake Iraq as a staging post for a ground invasion of Iran.
Desert Storm but much more retarded and much more costly.
At any rate the airborne troops being deployed are there to do something and it probably won't be cheap.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Claim that the US is not remotely near China in terms of production.
When presented with evidence that questions this claim, disbelieve it on the grounds that China is capable of producing more tenuously analogous but in fact entirely different items.
QED the USA is not remotely near China in terms of production.
Does China produce infinitely more TNT than the US? Factcheck: True. This says something important about the state of the US MIC. Chemical precursors, machine tools, component parts for what the US does produce, magnets, electronics - many of these are derived from China. What American production there is of important munitions and explosives is too small-scale.
OK... So how is US ABM production supposed to outscale Chinese missile production?
Firstly, you assume or bring up the idea that the US will hit or exceed its production targets in 7 years. The US routinely, almost constantly, misses munitions production targets because of industrial weakness, shortages of engineers and skilled workers, a lack of proficiency in quickly establishing factories and a poor regulatory environment. China doesn't have these problems.
Secondly, China's (much larger by floorspace!) expansion of missile production has to be outpaced by this US expansion. Maybe they'll add a few million more m^2 of production capacity in the next seven years. Or maybe they intensify their efforts further. If the US can intensify their efforts, why can't China?
Thirdly, the ABMs have to be actually accurate and performant. THAAD right now has been tested and found wanting against Iranian missile and drone attacks, of which China can surely launch at a much greater scale. It would be bizarre for a mid-size country, under severe sanctions, with 1/10th the engineers and 1/100th the money of China to outperform China quantitatively or qualitatively. Realistically THAAD will need to fire several interceptors against inbound missiles to achieve a good probability of a kill. It's an inherently uphill battle. Even with Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (which do have internal terminal guidance), judging by anti-ship missile history it's always been harder to defend than attack.
Finally, THAAD and the rest of the munitions scaling needs to meet US strategic goals in a war with China. The victory condition for America is not simply 'defend Guam from being bombed to unusability' or 'defend airbases in Japan' but also to defend Taiwan's independence, which requires somehow securing long shipping lanes of food, fertilizer and LNG to a small island off the coast of China. It would require not only destroying the PLAN but also the bulk of the Chinese air force and missile (including SRBMs) and drone forces, depriving China of their coercive abilities. It's an incredibly difficult task. It would be much easier to secure the straits of Hormuz. And yet the US has shown no sign of being able to do that, thus far.
Keep in mind that US has been attempting ballistic missile defense for more than three decades; the first Chinese conventional IRBM, the DF-26, became operational about a decade ago.
The US has been attempting ballistic missile defence since the 1950s and at no point has it been cost-efficient against a strong power. It isn't cost-efficient today against Iran and I can't see why it would be against China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024. China's more numerous SRBMs won't range Guam and most of Japan, and the MRBMs will only range Japan. So the US pre-ramp-up produces more ballistic missile interceptors with THAAD systems alone (nearly 100/year) than China produces ballistic missiles that could range Guam (if DoD estimates are even ballpark accurate). Maybe the question we should be asking is "How is China supposed to outrace the US in scaling munitions production?"
I don't believe these estimates. A country that produces vastly more steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones than the US can logically also produce far more ballistic missiles than the US can produce missile interceptors. It's reasonable to expect that China has an advantage in missile production, even before considering that missile defence is inherently more complicated than missile offence.
Ballistic missiles aren't easily countable, they're concealed in depots deep underground. Even the launchers are concealed and camouflaged.
China conducts more missile tests than the rest of the world combined. Per CNN, they've added 2 million square meters of floor space (including research) in missile facilities. The US is adding nowhere near that much.
Furthermore, we should be considering protracted warfare. Even if the stockpile is 1800 missiles, what matters is production rates 1 year in, 2 years into the war. Major wars often take longer than expected, stockpiles are expended and what matters is the scaling of production. Ukraine is a good example.
I don't think TNT is used for most of the high-end weapons systems
That's right but it's significant in showing where the US MIC is. They aren't remotely near China in terms of production. The US also seem to have fallen behind in high-end explosives like CL-20, which America invented but seems to struggle in deploying.
It's completely plausible for the Korean peninsula to see large ground battles requiring huge quantities of TNT. The South Koreans may be serious and proficient but there is only a certain amount that South Korea can do against a gigantic country like China.
I too read and enjoyed Colby's book.
How much do purges hurt the PLA? The strength of the Chinese military is not in their professionalism or training or experience but in their numbers and the scale of the munitions and technology that Chinese industry can supply them with. They can learn how to fight as they go, adapt and improve in wartime. They can promote new, younger and more talented generals. They cannot make a new industrial base in wartime.
When we think about military purges, we all think back to the Soviet Union pre-WW2. Military purges reduced their combat effectiveness by some degree, sure. But the strength of the Red Army was not in fighting well. They improved over the war but never fought as well as Germany did. They didn't need to be especially competent to prevail. They had mass!
The US seems to be purging generals right now, during a major conflict. The Army Chief of Staff is a fairly high profile role. Furthermore, it's significant in that the US doesn't have a China-tier industrial base, totalitarian-state casualty tolerance or that gigantic recruiting pool. The US needs to be fundamentally more capable and competent to prevail against a much bigger country.
Over the next five years, US munitions production levels are slated to ramp up to extremely high numbers
Extremely high... by US standards. Annual production of 400 THAAD interceptors in 7 years? The Chinese will burn through that in a week, probably on day 1. If the THAAD batteries are even there, they might be sent off to the Middle East by then.
There is currently no TNT production in the US. That's part of the 'munitions buildup' - restarting TNT production from zero.
The Army has set aside $650 million to design and construct a domestic TNT facility, targeting 5 million pounds (~2,270 metric tons) per year.
Does anyone know how much TNT China produces? Probably a lot more than 0 tonnes a year, maybe 30,000 to 60,000 tonnes. 2000 tonnes a year, all things considered, won't make much difference. If the US is aiming to match Russia in munitions production, there's no chance of beating China.
How is the US supposed to outrace China in scaling munitions production? The Chinese industrial base has cheaper components, cheaper energy, an ocean of engineers and machine tools frothing about.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
One wonders what they have on Trump at this point, this isn't his usual modus operandi. The other half of the Epstein files?
Maybe they just got rid of all the moderating influences in the general staff and elsewhere. I was reading just today that they tried this exact routine on Bush in 2007 but the CENTCOM commander said 'over my dead body' and blocked it: https://x.com/ClimateAudit/status/2039752164894015529
Has the French system delivered excellence? The nuclear power switchover, that was done well. High speed rail and infrastructure buildout, that was done well. The glorious years. But that's in the past.
What has the French system delivered more recently? Not joining the Iraq War, that's about it.
France has serious demographic and terror issues. There are troops constantly patrolling Paris with machine guns. This is not a sign of a well-managed society. The French economy is extremely indebted and lacks dynamism. Where is France in AI? Mistral is on the level of a single second-rate Chinese AI firm. Where is France in aerospace? The Rafale is at or below the level of China's export-grade 4th gen light fighters with export-grade missiles, as seen with India and Pakistan. France doesn't do 'export-grade', that's the best they've got.
Where is France in semiconductors? Nothing of great significance. French cars? Second-rate at best. Heavy industry and machine tools? That's Germany's department, France is behind Spain.
Only Airbus really stands out as top-tier performance. And Louis Vuitton I suppose (handbags do not matter). French nuclear power has slipped, skills have been lost and costs have soared.
French elites could have chosen to focus on uniting Europe, creating a power-bloc to rival America and China. Yet they constantly leave pan-European projects like the Eurofighter, they're arrogant and uncooperative. Instead they've focused on bringing in low-performance Africans and raising taxes punishingly high, crippling economic development. France has seriously ugly problems with pensions and spending because of the inadequacy of its leaders, the ethos and approach and ends they pursue. There's no issue with the French people, they've shown excellent abilities throughout history.
I invite you to contemplate the current state of American governance with its parade of Filter Model all-stars and tell me with a straight face that this proposition is working.
American governance can and is constantly faceplanting and they'll still be doing better than France or Britain. The US can make terrible decisions with terrible consequences but retain the core wealth-generating machine of their society, their huge technological base and be fine. The US also has all kinds of serious self-inflicted demographic problems too. But if you build and maintain the wealth machine then these are all manageable.
There's a fallacy where people see smart people running country A and dumb people running country B and assume that country A is better run. That need not be the case! Smart people can do tremendous damage to a country, as can the stupid. Well-ordered, mature, serious legal institutions with all this beautiful jurisprudence and meticulously educated officials executing well-formulated plans can absolutely crush and wreck a country like France. They'll just do it in an orderly, mature, serious, sophisticated way.
Having smart people running the country isn't at all necessary and may even be undesirable on average. Occasionally you get a Lee Quan Yew or a De Gaulle. But you might also get a skilful, cunning, sophisticated wrecker like Blair or Macron. Better an intellectually mediocre leader who sincerely loves his country than a 160 IQ genius who went to the very best schools, if he is in love with some grand ideological scheme, foreign power, personal profit or whatever else.
Konrad is a captain but he's not a military or strategy expert... You can tell in the diction these guys use, the difference between amateur and expert. I have no doubt he knows lots about freighters but he overestimates the relevance of shipping. You do not take risks in a major war for 'the SHIPS Act, the Jones Act, the U.S. flag fleet, and CMA CGM’s unfulfilled promise to triple its U.S.-flag vessels or Greenland.' None of that matters much at all in contrast to the huge stakes here. He sees everything through a shipping angle and neglects to take a wider view.
If the US had the power to open the straits they would. Firstly, oil and gas and helium and fertilizer are traded on the world market. High oil prices harm America since the US consumes lots of oil domestically, trades with other countries that use lots of oil! Konrad makes this weird point about prices bifurcating but Brent has still gone up a lot. That hurts the US.
Secondly, not opening the straits shows the US to be weak and incapable of defending the petrodollar.
Thirdly, not opening the straits gives Iran leverage and confidence in victory. To win wars you need to take the other side's cards away from them. Iran will hold out for more favorable peace terms if their primary means of leverage remains. They're even charging fees! Trump certainly wants to win, win bigly like nobody's ever won before. He wants to open the straits, fastly!
The US isn't opening the straits of Hormuz because they can't. An Arleigh Burke only has 96 VLS tubes for missiles. Some of those will be taken up with Tomahawks, already fired. The straits are a very confined space by maritime standards, it's like fighting in a telephone box. The destroyers would have to escort dozens of freighters every single day, under drone and missile attack night and day. Drones and missiles get through, that's just how things go. Not to mention that the destroyers could just get saturated, even if US air defence missiles were magical, perfectly accurate wonder weapons (they aren't). The escort would fail and possibly lose some destroyers too. That's why they haven't tried it.
A more plausible model is that Trump has demanded that the straits be reopened and the navy is deliberately trying to slow things down because they know if they just charge in it'll be a disaster.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
Well some of them surely can't read... unless you don't classify them as civilizational?
Anyway, I agree with your main point. Going too meta and abstract is generally bad for writing. Professional authorities on writing don't seem to be very good at it. How many great novelists got a degree? How many NYT 'bestsellers' are actually good and fun to read? Not to mention all the destructive fads that have been spurred by books. In Germany for instance "The Cloud" terrified millions, written just after the Chernobyl disaster with a brutal description of a meltdown, radiation poisoning, social breakdown. It was taught in schools.
Then we see German denuclearization and horrendously costly energy policies, in part spurred by electoral realities from a generation who'd been brought up on these scare stories.
Agreed, prior to this war I thought that Trump was at least better than Bush Junior but he's dived a whole league beneath Bush with this. At least Iraq wasn't strong enough to be a big pain like Iran.
This is what happens when you can't think soundly in strategic terms. The value of Greenland is microscopic compared to the value of Europe. 2 nuclear powers, ASML chip equipment, machine tools, 600 million people, precision optics, a fairly advanced defence industrial base and about 2 million troops. Europe could be a decisive factor in a world war with China, they provide the numerical weight to somewhat counterbalance China. There was coalition-building where Britain and France were going to help send fleets to Asia, that was part of the strategy.
Greenland is a frozen wasteland. The only vaguely valuable thing there is basing and radar that the US already has! Trump wanted to map-paint there, antagonized much more valuable countries over it. Same with tariffs. Tariff your enemies and not your allies.
The Iran war was predictably a terrible idea. The US seems to be getting kicked out of Iraq, while Iran has secured the straits of Hormuz de facto, possibly soon formally. Trump is reduced to telling other countries to go in and secure the oil themselves, since Iran has been 'decimated'. If Iran is so beaten then why not just go in with the US Navy and secure the oil, secure a big W for America? It's obnoxious to falsely declare victory and then usher allies into the death zone to do some futile bleeding, demand their assistance in a war that worsens their interests, a war they lack the power to win.
It's worse than Suez. Britain and France and Israel were crushing Egypt militarily, they landed troops and took Port Said in a week. There was no doubt they had the power to prevail on a purely military level. British troops weren't 'working from home' sitting in hotels because their bases were getting bombed out. The US is not just losing strategically but hasn't made any traction at all with regard to the strait. There has been no traction with regard to regime change either. Maybe that will change in future but it's looking really bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
This assumes that the Wuhan lab knew The Truth about what was going on
But they were the ones doing it? They couldn't accidentally be collecting these coronaviruses, testing them on humanized mice, putting furin cleavage sites in them...
I blame the scientists who were actually doing this stuff, not Chinese politicians who probably didn't understand or care that much and delegated to the 'experts'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
What're you gonna do about it, demand the world embargoes China
The Chinese govt wouldn't knowingly release a deadly virus on their own people. They made a costly display of how very 'anti-pandemic' they were, these are the people who invented lockdownism and stopping the spread.
The Chinese govt is naturally unwilling to admit any level of guilt or culpability for such a huge disaster, so they are covering it up and blaming the US. The US is behaving similarly.
My issue is with the researchers themselves, I want them punished severely to send a message and discourage others. Discouraging others is the whole point, we need to ensure this doesn't happen again. I don't care about the geopolitical level, all the blame should be dumped on Daszak, Bat Lady and the other gain of function researchers themselves.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
If it was zoonotic, why did the Wuhan laboratory take down their database of virus samples because of 'hacking' in late 2019 right when COVID emerged and then never bring it up again? How could they be so unlucky - this is key evidence that could've proven their innocence, if indeed they had no COVID precursor virus samples?
Who hacks databases of boring genetic information?
The whole epistemology of this is so bizarre. Biological researcher consensus concludes that biological researchers are not to blame for the biggest pandemic in living memory after all the evidence needed to confirm it either disappears or is solely under their control, is that really worthy of consideration? It was pretty straightforward in 2020 when we learnt about the biolab with its bat virus gain-of-function research program on humanized mice right next door... Nobody's going to do anything about this though. We live in a NGMI civilization.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US.
I enjoyed much of the essay but disagree here. Outside the US, amongst non-Americans, Americans are indeed looked down upon and considered stupid.
Some clips from Jeremy Clarkson: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JsMVncOU1K4
It's not merely my personal 'America is a greatly flawed country in many respects but also with great strengths' opinion but the strawman version of 'Americans are stupid, fat, uncultured, violent and fascist too'. My well-off Australian friends constantly bemoan America, how they harass you and ask for passwords and social media and fingerprints if you want to enter the US - those are just stories they've heard since they don't want to visit the US with Trump and all.
Even before Trump America was looked down on, the Clarkson clips are old and somewhat representative of ambient anti-American stereotypes. The War on Terror is perceived as a dumb idea executed badly, that the US dragged us into. Same with the war in Iran for that matter. They don't like American lifestyle either, how the food has chemicals in it, the tipping culture, the drug commercials, feeling unsafe in major cities... When I went to the US with some friends we didn't really like it, saw some guy shooting up on the street which was a new experience. Much preferred Europe, though it's also hard to feel safe in Paris with all the troops wandering around.
Nobody respects 'American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities'. Nobody really thinks about them at all, except insofar as Trump is perceived as wrecking them. What good are these institutions if Trump emerged and seemingly took over, people think. My legal-inclined friends don't like US jurisprudence, they think it's a mutated and degraded cousin of proper common law. All maluses and no pluses. It's an immature way to think about countries but that's just how the media seems to behave, that's the base expectation. I could point out to them that in terms of authoritarianism, our freedom-of-speech is much more limited than the US, the UK arrests many more people for political crimes but that's not something that people feel comfortable saying or thinking so much.
Maybe it's different in the developing world or China or Japan.
As a side note, this is untrue. J & S / WB belongs to Palestinian Arabs only in the sense that (1) the Arabs successfully ethnically cleansed Jews from the area in the 1930s and 1940s; and (2) under the principles of anti-Israel types, once the Arabs ethnically cleanse Jews from an area, it becomes Palestinian Land forever. So that if Jews return, they are "stealing" land.
This is false. If the Israelis are going in, knocking down houses or just taking them, then that is stealing land. QED. Again, Israel has been expanding in territorial size. Neccessarily this means it must be taking land off of other groups.
Whether it was Israel or America that attacked the girls school in Iran is not of great importance. I recall you were the one implying that it was somehow the Iranians who attacked their own school. Now going 'acktually it was America not Israel that blew up this specific war in an Israeli inspired war against Iran' does not advance any kind of serious position, it's just a lame Parthian shot.
In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace
Yet Israel's territory has grown larger over time? They gave Sinai back to Egypt after taking Sinai off Egypt, OK. They didn't give back the Golan heights to Syria, they've recently taken more land off Syria. They've been busily taking land off Palestinians in the West Bank for years now, knocking people's houses down or just stealing their houses. Right now they're going into Lebanon perhaps looking to seize more land.
They have this comically villainous strategy in the 'mosquito protocol', using Gazan civilians as human shields, making them enter buildings ahead of IDF troops to clear out explosives or booby traps.
Or they just take potshots at peaceful protestors in Gaza, back in 2019: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/03/one-year-on-from-protests-gaza-civilians-devastating-injuries-highlight-urgent-need-for-arms-embargo-on-israel/
They had huge protests rallying behind soldiers who were briefly arrested for raping prisoners, in support of that kind of activity. You can actually watch video of the Israeli soldiers forming up in this cluster around a prisoner with shields on their backs to block the camera from seeing exactly what happens. There's actual video of an Israeli govt minister saying 'for them, anything is permitted' with regard to sodomizing prisoners with metal objects. The pro-rape faction seems to have decisively won, with the soldiers being freed of all charges.
Why the special criticism of Israel?
Countries are formed by taking land, that's how it works. The essence of warfare is inflicting pain and suffering to reach a political goal. But Israel behaves in an especially egregious way for a supposed liberal democracy. Simultaneously they whine and bitch about anti-semitism and claim to be the victim whenever anyone criticises them. Amnesty international is apparently antisemitic, the UN is antisemitic, that American girl they ran over with a bulldozer was probably antisemitic, along with the USS Liberty survivors who maintain they were deliberately attacked. All these Palestinians were born into this world with hatred of Israel in their hearts, we are led to believe. It takes two to tango.
The Israelis go around complaining about Hamas using human shields while they do it themselves. They complain about the terrorism of others when their country was founded by terrorists - they shot a UN-appointed Swedish diplomat Bernadotte for being too pro-Arab, they captured and executed British troops, planned false-flag attacks against the West in Egypt and run a uniquely murderous intelligence agency in Mossad. It's a very obnoxious way for a country to behave. And yet their cheerleaders in the West like PragerU will say that the IDF is the 'most moral army'.
The hypocrisy upsets lots of people. Israel should be treated with the same naked contempt and grasping opportunism they treat other countries. They should be left to fight their own wars, use their own weapons, pay for them too. America has just plunged the world into a major economic crisis over their obsession with Israel, it's not at all a minor issue.
Yeah, that was a pretty bad sign. Also Elon not talking about it after day one. Elon is usually first to stick his head into a threshing machine with these things, I recall him bragging on day 1 about how Grok said the decapitation strike was a good move whereas Claude and GPT ummed and ahhed diplomatically. He changed the flag of Iran on twitter too to the monarchist flag. And given starlink and such, he was deeply involved with operations in Iran pre-war. But after day 1 he wasn't saying much of anything about the war.
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