video footage alone is actually not super good evidence.
Well, yes, it often isn't super good evidence. They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially, and statistically you would expect some of those captures to be high quality, but this does not happen. The fact that this does not happen is strong evidence against such phenomenon being real. Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.
On the subject of UFOs, both here and in your other comments you are fudging definitions pretty hard in order to conflate unlike things.
UFOs - meaning flying objects that are unidentified - certainly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and appear to perform incredible maneuvers - plausibly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and actually do perform incredible maneuvers - probably do not exist, but I would place low probability on some weak versions of this being true. The fact that these tic-tacs apparently like to hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets provides a convenient out to the 'why so little footage from 2010 onward?' question.
Flying Saucers - meaning alien spaceships that abduct folk from Arkansas and anally probe them and/or take them on whistle stop tours of the solar system - certainly do not exist, for the same reason that Bigfoot does not exist. The XKCD comic uses the term 'Flying Saucer' not 'UFO'. I expect this is deliberate.
Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.
shakenvac
20d ago
so you end up having to rely on witnesses.
But never video footage.
Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue
You're talking about literal transubstantiation? hang on, how do they know it's human heart tissue if they can't sequence the DNA? what does it even mean to not be able to sequence the DNA? Like, the machine broke?
Hoaxes are a known source of Christian relics. Apparently there are over 30 holy nails in various european curches and cathederals today! there were probably enough holy nails and pieces of the true cross floating around 15th century europe to fill a warehouse.
shakenvac
20d ago
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them
If there was even one example of an honest-to-god miracle for which uncontrovertable evidence existed, that alone would be sufficient to prove God (or, at least, the supernatural). Of course, such evidence does not exist.
shakenvac
22d ago
No, all you really have to believe is that the markets are more rational than Donald Trump, which is not a hard sell.
How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches?
A lot. Say, 6 submarines times 20 missiles a sub times 8 re-entry vehicles a missile = nearly a thousand nukes. Not enough to totally cripple Russia in a first strike, but if your theory is that all you need to do is kill the leadership then more than enough to do that.
Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though?
5-10 minutes should be sufficient. But if for some reason it wasn't then regardless the answer is still yes.
Who gives that order?
The dead hand. Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.
Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?
Probably. But even if not, don't underestimate the survivability of this stuff. Don't overestimate the destructive power of nukes. Military hardware needs to be hit directly or it will likely survive. Those mobile ICBMs are gonna be hard to find. Part of the reason for the insane overbuild of the cold war by both sides was 'we only need a small percentage of this stuff to survive a first strike to totally obliterate the enemy'. Nukes miss, they fizzle, they burn up in orbit due to manufacturing defects, they fail to launch, they fail in flight, they are mis-targeted due to faulty Intel. And you don't know in advance which sites you will fail to destroy so you have to shoot and look. It's like a game of whack a mole with 5000 moles, and if you miss one you get your brains blown out. For these reasons and more, the US never really believed it could pull off an unanswered first strike.
shakenvac
27d ago
NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.
Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit. They also have mobile ICBMs which can be ordered to drive around randomly and be safe from a first strike that way. The dead hand system could launch a second strike with zero human input.
In other words, Ukraine joining NATO would not have changed the MAD calculus for Russia, and the Soviet Union was aware of their position and built a robust retaliatory and second strike capability.
shakenvac
1mo ago
If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.
Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.
I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way
Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
Sure, if that's the hill you want to die on I'll cop that that was an overbroad statement. It is pretty common for Trump's supporters to demand maximal charity for every dumbshit retarded thing he says ('oh, that's not what he really means') while offering absolutely zero leeway for rhetoric or hyperbole in the statements his opponents.
I am pretty sick of being expected to give Trump orders of magnitude more charity than he or his supporters would ever give to me.
shakenvac
1mo ago
Good post, my only concern is that it goes too far in an attempt to make order out of chaos. Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker. I too hoped that Elon would form some sort of intellectual foundation for this administration, but as you note, he has gone off the deep end. Vance is a clever guy, but he is also a suckup. I don't think he has it in him to actually stand up to Trump, and I think he knows that even if he does Trump will just burn him.
shakenvac
1mo ago
Yes, and Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist with a fake birth certificate, a trans wife, and also he's probably the antichrist. Weak men are superweapons.
This is a class of objection that is very popular among Trump's supporters, as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible), and it also neatly elides any discussion of what Trump has actually said and done. "see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is. I personally have nothing to apologise for on that front, as I never engaged in such hysteria.
Trump is unlike Hitler in many ways. One of those ways is that, unlike Trump, Hitler had a theory. He 'knew' what had caused the ills of Germany, and acted accordingly. Trump, on the other hand, is just a thoughtless man with no moral center. His greatest achievement in this term so far has been to remove the safety rails that kept him from fucking anything up too badly in his first term. From here we are in uncharted territory. It is impossible to know what Trump is going to do next, he spouts so much bullshit that not even his strongest advocates can predict him. But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.
With all that said, I don't entirely disagree with the thrust of your post. The reason that a man like Donald Trump appealed to so many is that progressives overplayed their hand. I feel no need to let those who pushed woke to this point off the hook. But if they have to own that, then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.
shakenvac
1mo ago
this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters
Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.
I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.
shakenvac
1mo ago
Donald Trump is ultimately a pretty simple person. He is not particularly learned or intelligent, and has precious little intellectual curiosity. He doesnt really understand economics or geopolitics. He does not have any overarching moral philosophy or theory of the world. He is not playing chess with any number of dimensions, and in fact probably thinks that playing chess (real or metaphorical) is for nerds and pussies. He does not have an ounce of nobility in his soul, is constrained by no moral framework, and holds nothing sacred. Concepts such as 'friendship', 'gratitude', 'fairness', and 'loyalty' are alien to him (though he understands 'fealty' well). There is a decent chance he is a psychopath. The virtues he does have are of the sort you might expect from a real estate mogul with a string of failed businesses: he is ruthless, he is cunning, he is bold, he is unafraid to tell people he doesn't like to fuck off, and happy to throw his weight around. He understands leverage, he understands power, he understands submission.
What does he want from Canada? He wants to be respected and feared. He wants to go down in history. He wants a win.
He had no concept of what a good or fair trade deal with Canada would look like, but his real estate instincts scream: 'we are the big dog, and they are the little bitch. I bet I can get way more out of them. We can squeeze them harder, and all they will be able to do is knuckle under.' It is worth stating the obvious: fentanyl is an excuse, and a bad one at that. Trump does not give a fuck about fentanyl junkies and wouldnt piss on them if they were on fire. The only problem is, Canada is not a fund run by bean counters. It is a nation state, it has its pride, and they are perfectly capable of giving the finger to those that treat them like shit, even if it means taking a bit of a kicking.
So what can Canada do? They can try to flatter Trump's ego, and give him the smallest possible win that they think will mollify him. That will be a hard line to ride. Or, they can, politely, tell him to get fucked, and weather the storm.
shakenvac
1mo ago
If it could be achieved with a minimum of bloodshed and the broad assent of the Canadian people then yes, I agree. But this is impossible. And achieving it any other way would be the beginning of the end for American geopolitical dominance.
shakenvac
1mo ago
This will surprise you as much as I imagine it will surprise Trump, but Canadians are, in fact, proud of their identity. ("Proud? Of being Canadian?" "Yes, Mr President, I know it sounds strange but I assure you it is true")
Why would Canadians want to join the USA? To be beholden to a constitution to which they have no fondness, to a federal government to which they feel no fealty? Have you seen the polls on this question? Additionally, if Canada did somehow join the USA, they would not be state 51, but rather states 51-60. That plus 40 million new left-leaning citizens would probably mean Democrats sweeping the elections for a generation.
shakenvac
1mo ago
Canada and Europe are not the enemies of the United States. This is so obviously true I dont think there is a need to expand upon it further. Even now, the USA is merely being downgraded to 'unreliable partner'
It is however well within my model of Donald Trump that he sees no distinction between the USA and his person, and will use the might of the former to retaliate for real and percieved slights against the latter
I wouldn't count myself as a critic of the atomic bombings. It was a war crime in a war that was war crimes from beginning to end. Was it justifiable (in the moral sense) on the basis that not dropping the bombs would have resulted in ultimately a far worse outcome for all involved? Personally, I think so. But under the modern Law of Armed Conflict, such a bombing would not even be close to passing muster.
Sure, in hindsight it probably won the war, but all military acts are designed to win the war in some sense. That does not give all actors carte blanche to do anything they want on the basis that it may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Ostensibly, the military infrastructure of Hiroshima was the true target of the bombing. the ~100k collateral civilian deaths caused by the bomb would certainly not be considered proportional to the military value of destroying those enemy assets.
shakenvac
2mo ago
(and even then, from what I know, I think you could reasonably argue at least some of the Allied bombing strikes weren't justified)
This is the piece of the puzzle that I think you are missing. The bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and dozens of other strategic air raid targets are totally unjustifiable by modern standards. They fail the tests of both proportionality and distinction. Were we to be using the standards of the allies in WWII (which were still higher than the standards of the Axis) then Israel turning the Gaza strip to rubble with carpet bombing or nukes would be, if not justifiable, at least comfortably within the window of normality.
Of course there is another option - you don't put yourself in that position in the first place. you don't bite off more than you can chew, as an institution. and if you fuck up and end up overbooked, then you take the hard choice and start cancelling surgeries. There might not be another airline pilot available, you think that excuse would fly when a pilot crashes an airliner into a mountain because he was exhausted? of course not. So why should it fly when an exhausted surgeon perforates a bowel or misreads a chart?
shakenvac
4mo ago
If you get a surgery done the person operating on you might be on hour 28 and gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before that long ass shift.
I'm from the UK, where a typical long shift for a doctor is 13 hours, so I cant really tell if this is an exaggeration.
But if this is true, holy shit. That is absolutely outrageous. how can you with a straight face protest that doctors are so desperately committed patient wellbeing, while accepting a 28 hour long surgery shift? There's no other way to describe it - that's dangerous. You, above all, should know what the science tells us about decreasing performance with fatigue. Any airline pilot that accepted a shift even close to that would lose their license.
shakenvac
6mo ago
This is a really interesting perspective, but I admit I have a hard time vibing with it. I tried to get into art appreciation when I was younger. Went to the national galleries and the Tate modern, hemmed and hawed at paintings and modern art pieces. This was the top 1% of the top 1% of art, and yet I was disappointed that there was usually very little explanatory notes to go along with the piece. Often when I did find some guide to the 'canon' meaning of the art it was usually perfunctory and not terribly interesting. Usually I preferred my own interpretation to the one I was apparently supposed to draw from the piece. I fully admit this was probably a 'me' problem. Perhaps art appreciation is a deliberately clutivated skill and I simply wasn't able to develop it
All this to say that I'm a 'meaning is in the eye of the beholder' kinda guy when it comes to art. If I draw something meaningful from a piece, I'm not sure it matters if it wasn't the meaning the creator intended, or even if the creator intended no meaning at all.
Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?
shakenvac
6mo ago
I think that human, natural language definitions of 'stealing', 'plaigiarism', 'copying' etc are not totally fluid. These are words with specific meanings. If someone wants to argue that AI-art is bad on consequentialist grounds then sure, crack on. But 'stealing' is not a catch all term for 'bad'
Whether or not AI-art is bad, I maintain it is not theft.
shakenvac
6mo ago
If your view is that we need to redefine what 'stealing' is in order to specifically encompass what AI does then yes, you can make the argument that AI art is stealing, but if you do that you can make the argument that literally anything is stealing, including things that blatantly aren't stealing.
AI training is novel, but I don't at all agree that it is so novel that it cannot possibly be placed into the existing IP framework. In fact I think it fits reasonably comfortably. I do not believe there is anything that AI training and AI generation does that could be reasonably interpreted to violate any part of IP law, nor the principles upon which IP law is based. You cannot IP protect a style, genre, composition, or concept. You cannot prevent people using a protected work as an inspiration or framework for another work. You cannot prevent people from using techniques, knowledge, or information gleaned from copyrighted work to create another original work. You cannot prevent an individual or company from examining your protected work. You cannot induce a model to reproduce any copyrighted work, nor reverse engineer any from the model itself. Indeed, carveouts in IP law like 'fair use' - which most people who decry AI art would defend passionately - gives far more leeway to individuals than would be required to justify anything generated by an AI.
I wouldn’t want to accuse everyone who is down on AI art as being insincere or a dirty rotten motivated-reasoner -many people freely admit their concern is mainly for the livelihood of artists-, but I have seen these discussions play out many times on many different forums. I have rarely seen the ‘AI-art is stealing’ argument withstand even the barest scrutiny. It is often pushed by people who clearly do not understand how these models work, while aggressively accusing their opponents of not understanding how they work. As @Amadan pointed out in his far-better-than-mine post, when faced with the hypothetical of an ethically trained AI, people do not declare their issues are resolved, which indicates that the core of the disagreement is elsewhere. It smacks of post-hoc reasoning.
Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
I think the actual root of the objections are sympathetic. Artists are high status in online communities. People see a threat to them, empathise, and develop the core feeling of ‘AI-art bad’. From there we are into arguments-as-soldiers territory. Everyone knows that stealing is bad, so if you can associate AI art with stealing, even if the association makes little sense, then that’s a win.
shakenvac
6mo ago
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
Ostensibly, it's about the AI 'stealing' public art to train itself. (I agree with you that this argument is nonsense)
More realistically, it's people disliking the idea of robots putting artists out of work.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Many times over the past few centuries, skilled workers have found themselves driven into obsolescence by technology. Very few of them succeeded in holding back the tide for long. If I were a digital artist, I would urgently be either swapping to a physical medium, or figuring out how I could integrate AI into my workflow.
Would you have been advocating for peace with Japan on December 8 1941? Is a military campaign which resulted in the deaths of half a million Japanese civilians a sane answer to a surprise attack which killed 2,500 sailors?
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