pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
No bio...
User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
21d ago
These foundational ideas are good as far as they go, but I think makes it clear the point the girl was getting at: these are the minimum basic requirements to be an American. Is there nothing more? Is that all there is? Sam might say, no there is nothing more. Everything else is an illusion or not genuinely American, but I think this is (a) profoundly unsatisfying for a lot of people and (b) not historically genuine. What are the aspirational aspects of being an American? I can think of a few things that I thing makes someone a good American:
- Industriousness and/or self-reliance
- Charity and respect for strangers
- Weak regard for social class
- Civic nationalism
I don't think there's anything the slightest bit untoward about desiring to live in an America with more people who share those values and fewer people who wreck the commons, bugger their neighbors, and exhibit antisocial behavior. Yes, it's possible to tolerate those who don't share these values, and it's better to grant dispensation than engage tyranny to force an outcome. But it is unpleasant and it would surely create a more desirable society if people would, through the power of assimilation and persuasion, voluntarily adopt such values. I'm baffled and increasingly despondent that people find this to be a totally unreasonable imposition, and demand that instead Americans give up these values to accommodate people who don't share them and don't feel inclined to change.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22d ago
If so the only logical response would be to dramatically increase the scrutiny applied to granting of permanent resident status. It is unacceptable that we would be required to import people who seek to destroy us.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22d ago
Charitably, Walsh must be communicating something other than the plain meaning of his words. In this case, he must mean "I don't think the media is covering this enough", or "the media isn't being adequately sympathetic to Tesla".
They are "covering" it in the sense of reporting that it is happening , but not in the same way they would cover it if there was an opposite political valence, e.g. haranguing political leaders to demand accountability or issue groveling condemnatiions, and heavily insinuating wider responsibility to political fellow travelers.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22d ago
This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
26d ago
Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
This is the part that seems like the lynchpin to me. Suppose that the Europeans reasonably believe, as they have for 50 years now, that they can call America's bluff here and either not pony up, or only pony up for things that are not useful to the war effort like expanded benefits for servicemembers? Are we willing to back that up by writing off Europe? Is Europe able to hold us hostage by putting a knife to their own throats?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
What use do they have for citizenship?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
That is the easily foreseeable outcome of a security guarantee. Trump is 100% correct not to offer this.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
You cannot use commercial reactor fuel for weapons (except some kind of dirty bomb). It would be easier to make weapons material from scratch.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
You're just dealing with a catastrophic loss of trust, driven by I think mostly Covid and woke ideological excess. That puts this stuff in the same category as public restrooms and park benches: it sure was nice when we lived in a society where we could have these things without them being abused and ruined for everyone.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
On the other hand, forming a complicated web of alliances, security guarantees, and geopolitical networks is somewhat the thing that escalated into WWI. It's worth considering that making security guarantees allows the opponent to decide when to trigger a large scale conflict.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership.
What "influence and leadership" does the U.S. have that is not transactional already? EU seems to believe U.S. "leadership" consists of them making decisions and us paying for it. Our "influence" in most other countries consists mainly of bribery in the form of foreign aid and trade concessions. This is all transactional already! What soft power we do have comes from cultural output completely independent of and irrelevant to our foreign policy establishment, and that has all gone to absolute shit anyways.
From my perspective it seems like we're the Sugar Daddy who is promised that we're really, truly, loved and fun to be with, so long as the wallet comes out. They'll say nice(ish) things about us exactly as long the checks keep flowing. One second later, we're monsters who are killing the entire world.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Trump is a “make it so” kind of guy.
You mean Jean-Luc Picard? I don't know, I think if Trump was a starship captain he would be Jellico. "Get it done."
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
I would distinguish activities that have a tangible, elevated risk of death from ones that have a risk of death high enough that the odds of dying in repeated acts over time approaches 1. Riding a motorcycle or smoking is risky, but someone who does those things, even their whole life, is not likely to die from them even though they might. Consuming recreational doses of street narcotics is something that, if you do it frequenlty enough, is very likely to kill you sooner or later.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Congress can delegate their power to subordinate positions. Why can't the President?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
If you choose to repeatedly engage in an activity that you know has a high risk of death, that's just suicide with plausible deniability. I don't consider someone who loses a game of Russian roulette to have suffered a "fatal accident".
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
"Safe, lethal legal, and rare." I've been fooled by this before.
That is to say, I believe you and believe your earnestness, but I just cannot conceive of how you would stop cultural slide on this without a solid Chesterton fence.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
You can find papers with actuarial analysis, side effect rates and presentations, justification for the schedule and so on.
So do it.
I can't. You know I can't. I don't have the background training, or the time, or possibly even the raw intelligence. And even if I did, I don't have the credentials that are required to make my opinion valid.
This is just ordinary epistemic helplessness. I do know two things: first, that this is beyond my primary knowledge. Second, the people I trusted to inform me betrayed me.
I know of no other option than extreme skepticism until such time as trust can be rebuilt. But it does take time.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
To me the most parsimonious explanation is that there are details that are relatively probable but highly embarrassing to the federal government. For example, if Oswald did indeed start shooting, but that it was an accidental discharge from a Secret Service agent (possibly still alive) which blew Kennedy's head off and killed him.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Just finished Trinity's Child, the book which the HBO made-for-tv movie Dawn's Early Light is based on. It was written probably at the peak of 80's SIOP nuclear paranoia and presents a look at the difficulties that stopping even a limited engagement would be due to the number of dead-man's switches in place. The book is a little dour, and the writing has the flavor of a journalist trying their hand at creative writing, which is what it was, and it didn't pull too many punches. It's certainly no Tom Clancy novel in that respect, though it is similar in the way that it proceeds mechanistically on a fixed timeline across several plot threads. The movie was a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book, but obviously without the internal existential crises the characters go through in the book. I couldn't acquire it either physically or electronically new and had to buy a used copy that appears to be an original hardcover printing that circulated in the Richmond public library.
It was an interesting read, and it prompted me to think a while about why global thermonuclear war seems to trigger so little existential dread now as compared to then, despite the weapons still existing in roughly the same form. I suppose it's partly because the number has definitely been reduced but also because the perception at least is that with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the level of alert is noticeably lower. The bombers are not on 24-hour alert and the Post-Attack Command and Control System is not on continuous airborne alert status. However, the pieces are all still maintained and operational, and something like SIOP still exists. I think it's an underrated existential threat these days, compared to climate change and meteor strikes.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
I thought there was some evidence that nicotine suppressed it?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Right? It wasn't that long ago that asking others to call you by a nickname was cringe. It wasn't that long ago that if your name kind of sucked, people would just choose a different one for you.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.
This came out just this week: https://microsoft.github.io/Magma/
Magma is the first foundation model that is capable of interpreting and grounding multimodal inputs within its environment. Given a described goal, Magma is able to formulate plans and execute actions to achieve it. By effectively transferring knowledge from freely available visual and language data, Magma bridges verbal, spatial and temporal intelligence to navigate complex tasks and settings.
Things are moving very quickly now.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Doing this with an executive order is a naked grab for power from both the courts and congress, with no recourse for either.
Not so, executive orders are themselves reviewable by the Supreme Court.
Even granting that in this specific case the subject in question is not broadly anti-American, the principle being proposed - that permanent residents cannot have their status revoked for any free speech activity, even including explicit subversion and undermining of our own policy - is so broad as to make vetting earlier in the process much more important.
More options
Context Copy link