theSinisterMushroom
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User ID: 3332
theSinisterMushroom
3d ago
If most trafficking has to come by boat or plane I'd be ecstatic. I see your point about scope creep, seems like a trap the US has fallen for before.
The Chinese have what they consider an entire secessionist province with substantial foreign smuggling and arms trafficking as a neighbor
The Taiwanese are either scared shitless and hoping for more status quo or resigned to an eventual Chinese takeover, maybe with a newer, shinier pinky promise about one country two systems. Taiwan would never dare to provoke the mainland by allowing any serious smuggling or arms trafficking. But I wonder, when they look at America, do they see a strong horse or a weak one?
theSinisterMushroom
4d ago
I realize now that DeepSeek is pretty much the perfect Chinese game theory move: let the US believe a small AI lab full of cunning Chinese matched OpenAI, with a tiny fraction of the compute budget, with no ability to get SOTA GPUs. Let the US believe the export regime works, but that it doesn't matter, because Chinese brilliance is superior, demoralizing efforts to strengthen it. Additionally, it would make the US skeptical of big investment in OpenAI capital infrastructure because there's no moat.
The report is quite detailed and the process supposedly cheap enough that we should get easy confirmation if it works.
If DeepSeek does have access to much more compute (smuggled in or otherwise), then maybe the thought is they may have an o3-level model in-house. The actually paranoid thought is that the released models may be compromised. I'm not sure how easy to tell if there's a SolidGoldMagikarp in it. But a US-based company could run the training to check if it's actually $5 million.
theSinisterMushroom
4d ago
The moment the cartels hit united states politicians or citizens will be an inflection point, for sure. It won't end well for them
I acknowledge my mistake of your intent, and will simply adjust by noting I consider this a terrible idea. Providing global audiences, including competitors, skeptics, and wavering audiences, documentary evidence of American war crimes is quite appreciable downsides for American efforts globally, particularly when trying to hide behind false-flag islamic terrorism in a region that notably has a lack of it (because the cartels have a history of not tolerating it).
In the released video, maybe add a short video snippet of the victims of their crimes. Or don't release anything, maybe legends will spread of the ghosts of cartel victims taking out entire bases.
And this is without the issue of the intervention being framed on principles that the intervention is supposed to mitigate, not perpetuate. The propaganda of 'American gangsters are moving in' practically writes itself.
Any news stories about American gangs invading would die down quick enough. Obviously the stories of Mexican gangsters moving into the United States don't upset them too much.
But yes, if the Mexico-US border is such that there need to be gangsters running it, then those gangsters should understand that there are certain limits to what behavior can be tolerated. If that is unacceptable, they decide to go to mat for fentanyl and reorganize to insurgent activity and accept Chinese military support and we lose, then it's better to get this metaphorical American Century of Humiliation started already than keep pretending.
Hence why it is critical that any intervention be with the consent / support of the local government, and not in contemptuous indifference to their position, as the OP took.
Yes, this would be ideal. Will it happen? Maybe the government declares an emergency following a newly surfaced/resurfaced video of cartel violence and forms an agency nominally under the president's control, that would be kinda cool. Maybe some respected or shadowy Mexican agency or the army just takes credit? Just spitballing here
For a basis of comparison- the US costs in Japan and Korea from 2016 to 2019 were less than 40 billion USD, or 40,000,000, 000. For the cartels to have resources a dozen orders of magnitude less than the resources the US uses over multiple years as part of treaty commitments, the Cartels would need to spend less than $1.
I think the mistake was quantitative rather than qualitative. The overmatch is still brutal. Would spending $20 bln on an anticartel op or two not be a drop in the bucket? Let's see how far that can get us towards stamping out fentanyl moving in from Mexico. Maybe it's worth the investment. How much is continuing to push fentanyl on America worth it to the cartels? How much is stopping it worth it to us?
And your view on the historical patterns of when the 'Don't just stand there- do something!' instinct in the face of bad things is mixed with policy proposals to attack outsiders because internal reforms are dismissed as 'too hard'?
Yes, the US needs to work on itself too. Still, it's a low hanging fruit to insist that your neighbors stop breaking into your house to sell fentanyl. It's too profitable to stop? Let's make it unprofitable. No sorry tell your addicted sister to fix herself doesn't warm my heart.
theSinisterMushroom
5d ago
I don't like falling in the same camp as the 'China is the source of all evil' people but there is a good chance that the Chinese state is smiling on people exporting fentanyl precursors to the US. "Try to wreck our high-tech industries with sanctions and keep us in the middle income trap? Plant COVID on us (note that China also has an official history that the US used bioweapons against them in Korea)? We will bury you in narcotics, we'll wreck your high-tech industries with IP theft and industrial policy."
Their beef should be with Britan, we didn't do the opium wars, no fair!
You send stealthy long-loiter-time surveillance drones over mexico. You use them to ID organized Cartel activity, cross-referencing electronic intel from the NSA. When you locate a concentration of Cartel activity, a stealthy plane drops a container from 35,000 feet, which pops open at 30,000 feet and spills out a hundred small anti-personnel drones. These drones fly down to the target area and messily unalive selected targets in the strike zone, recording high-quality video of exactly who they splatter in the process. No hellfires, no demolished buildings; half-pound directional frag charges, with close range and wide-angle video record of exactly who was hit and what they were doing.
I remember seeing a video of those military drone swarms in action a few years ago. Wish I could find it again
Maybe it's still not worth the effort. I am a fairly committed non-interventionist, and there is certainly a strong non-interventionist argument to be made here. But these are in fact some of the most vile people on earth, the harm they cause is considerable, and they're right fucking there. Maybe we really do have to just put up with them indefinitely as they rape and murder and torture and poison and corrupt both our biggest neighbor and our own citizens. But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
theSinisterMushroom
5d ago
There's only so many evidence chain manufacturers, plus it's a adversarial process you don't want to fuck up. Then you also have to try to arrest them. Of course, the cartels don't bother with any of that, they just kill you.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
Yeah, seeing just the non-secret developments in new drone and satellite technologies makes this completely non-credible for me.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
Is this about the Zetas? I don't want to relitigate shit from the 1800s about how America is a bad neighbor. Please let me know when and how the United States has fucked over Mexico to the tune of trillions of dollars of cumulative economic damage, enriching themselves in the process.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
Your analogies look bad to me too. Criminal groups inside the US have a lot of legal protections. They, of course, act with impunity, and their bosses can retreat to Mexico and go neener neener, you can't hit me.
Afghanistan is 7,300 miles away, Mexico we share a border with. Afghanistan was also a while ago, we have learned lots of lessons, we have much better technology. Will this stupid comparison never die?
You also seem to think no American citizens speak Spanish and are tired of drugs and cartels fucking up their communities.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
My plan is that the cartel bosses that continue to not play nice with the United States will keep dying. Sooner rather than later they will learn to order their thugs to wind down certain operations. Maybe just a few to start. @FCfromSSC puts it much eloquently below.
In exchange, maybe they can receive certain protections, and be guided to switch to economically productive governance.
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share.
These autonomous rivals living in Morelia or Gonzalez or Durango or wherever all seem to know exactly who their boss is. Let's make sure the ones near the border know that their boss' boss is American.
If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
No, it does not.
What does it mean, if anything, allowing you and your neighbors to be abused by some of the most objectively evil criminal enterprises in existence?
What does it mean about the sovereignty of Mexico that it's been infiltrated by and protects these psychopathic paramilitary gangs as they flood their neighbors with the most evil drugs?
theSinisterMushroom
5d ago
It's cool that there's some softer mechanisms starting to turn here as well.
theSinisterMushroom
5d ago
Thank you for the reply, it was interesting to chew on.
It's not that the US lacks the firepower or the manpower or the wealth, they lack the political capacity and will to execute these kinds of imperial military operations.
Maybe this is a Only Nixon could go to China type of moment.
If cartels are so easy to beat in Mexico, why can't the US wipe out the drug dealers in America?
Kind of hard to beat an opponent you're not allowed to touch their core.
How well did the US fare in the last campaign against a nebulous collection of unconventional forces in a drug-rich foreign land?
This feels like learned helplessness. China doesn't seem to have a drug crisis, is it not profitable to sell fentanyl to Chinese citizens from across their borders? Why not?
The lessons of Afghanistan should be applied to Mexico which is considerably larger.
The difference is that Mexico is our neighbor, and their gangs are literally controlling territory inside the core of the United states. And yes, we better have learned a lot of lessons since Afghanistan.
I saw the whole documentary. The fact that this sort of thing is acceptable or met with shrugs, they're just too strong, too manly for us to control makes me want to short America and long China.
China and Russia would leap at the chance to flex their muscles and make even more problems in the US's sphere of influence, tie them down and bleed them.
This is the strongest point. I'm not sure I can fully address it. But isn't Russia busy enough? Would they risk aggravating the Unites States even more, especially now? I just don't see it. Will China go mask-off? Maybe.
The cartels would start acquiring MANPADs, ATGMs, explosives, cash, drones.
Are they actually willing to transform their enterprises from successful money-making operations to Afghan-style insurgencies where they hide in tunnels for weeks? What will their leaders do once their compounds, palaces, armies, themselves start blowing up?
How should the US act? Slowly build up political capacity step by step, don't leap straight to the end boss. Crack down on drugs at home before an ill-planned, hazy military action overseas. Fight where you are strongest and where the enemy is weakest, build up confidence and experience.
Agree here, but there are also certain windows of opportunity that may or may not stay open forever. Is China more or less likely to involve itself next year? The year after? How long do you suffer this violation in a contested world?
Thank you for the pushback, even though I'm not convinced.
If you do so anyway, there are many, many, many ways it can go badly, particularly if the sovereign state doesn't give you permission.
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
Given how many things in diplomacy rest of voluntary cooperation, there are many ways for an unwanting state to make their neighbor's life difficult, even without armed resistance, and in the modern era there are also easy ways for that to go very, very costly.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
This doesn't even touch how foreign state actors could partake and interfere- such as smuggling weapons (see- drones) to cartels for use against the Americans.
It would be a pretty mask off moment for those foreign state actors. Russia/Iran/NK are sorta busy. China would rather bide its time and build up for a few more years, and it would focus on Taiwan anyways. Maybe some South American countries would consider getting involved?
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast. If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
theSinisterMushroom
5d ago
You're arguing it's a no-win situation, but can the incumbent hegemon allow itself to capitulate to foreign cartels controlling its territory during times of global stress?
This makes sense to me. I do remember that the US has suspended aid to Ukraine for 90 days. I'm assuming this is a signal to Putin that he has three months to make something happen or fold. But it could be cover. If there is reticence from the cartels, and there is a decapitation strike, pour encourager les autres, any equipment Putin sends may cause Trump to escalate in Ukraine.
I actually think that counterinsurgency has gotten drastically easier for a committed modern army. It helps if you don't need to occupy the territory or win hearts and minds. For all the gnashing and wailing about potential collateral damage, cartels are raping torturing and executing men, women, and children.
Drones and satellites are quite the force multiplier in the AI age. Special forces battalion on bradleys with night vision, orlan/supercam and switchblade drones and whatever drone carrier/swarm secret tech the CIA has cooking would go through a narco base like butter for at least a while. How long would the cartel heads be willing to endure this punishment?
I also remember looking at a map of the cartel areas of influence in Mexico where I noticed some smaller cartels around the border, Arellano Felix, Carrillio Fuentes. Maybe those can be induced to play ball if they are not already.
Help me understand an argument about the US-Mexico relationship
A friend and old-coworker recently posted in a group chat an article quote
«Trump … mulled sending military special forces into Mexico to fight drug cartels» [I couldn't find the article by quote, but maybe it's from a Mexican source]
They think that if that were to happen “both the general population and government unofficially would side with the narcos (for different reasons).” Radicalization and bad things would follow. Firstly, I thought these things already happened. Was Sicaro not just exaggerated for effect, but complete fiction?
We diverted for a bit into the politics of Mexico under the cartels. It was fun to be reminded that there still are areas not even the military will go into without cartel approval, that AMLO used to visit El Chapo’s mother regularly, that any information given to federal agencies or even directly to the president was pretty much immediately relayed to the cartels. Apparently, cartel-unfriendly political candidates are routinely assassinated. So the state seems to have been completely captured by the cartels. They have also deeply infiltrated the local and federal law enforcement agencies. The cartels have their own military equipment, intelligence agencies maybe, air force?, submaries (not armed though I hope?)
Still, even without local police or federal government involvement (who I understand most are assets of or actual narcos) I assumed the DEA/CIA/FBI still did shit to keep things in check, at least around the border and inside the US. Well actually, cartels are expanding into Colorado these days.
Enter Trump's executive order Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
My friend was incensed, thinks that any action by special forces would be war, that the Mexican people and government will rally around the cartels, there would be terrorist attacks and sabotage by cartels/Mexican immigrants.
I’m afraid here is where I lost my cool a little bit. Paraphrasing:
Me
Do what you want in your country, seems like the people voted for this [probably not true given political assassinations/voter intimidation], but imo the US is within its rights to target the cartels that operate around/across the borders.
M. Bridge
If the USA starts a war with the neighbor to the South, that will not go well for anyone
Me
Not a war, just a special military operation ;) This won't be a "war" because the Mexican military won't do shit I imagine there might be an ultimatum delivered to the cartels, escalating to raids and precision bombing of cartel compounds/assets.
M. B
surely you're joking
Me
Why are the cartels so precious to Mexicans that an attack on them is an attack on their country and their pride?
M. B
because narcos have weapons, money and more
Me
and they also have military equipment, submarines, and more But much worse signals intelligence, no f-35s, precision bombs or satellites, etc
M. B
that's still war
Me
Actually it's not war, there's just this new American cartel called "forces especiales" that has weapons, money, and more and that has the support of the president and that operates across the US-Mexico border But if the Mexicans want to call it war then so be it
M. B
🤦
Me
I hope that cooler heads will prevail; Lebanon did not call it war when Israel fought and decapitated Hezbollah
M. Oldschool
There's actually an ex-Mexican special forces cartel trained by the CIA in insurgency/counter insurgency tactics that became the most violent cartel.
Me
[Mugatu: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!] I understand that Mexico is a cartel-run state, but why should America's cartel, the actual US government/military, not insist that they fuck off our borders "we'll feel bad and consider going to war with you if you don't allow our muderous kidapping raping drug-and-people-trafficking home team do whatever it wants?" Is that the argument?
I guess what I want to know is, Am I The Asshole?
theSinisterMushroom
17d ago
Maybe this won't generate great discussions, but thanks for posting this. While I try to keep up with international news, I missed a few stories.
Deepsea internet cable connecting Taiwan to the rest of the world cut off by China.
It's infuriating that there seems to be no defense/response to this
Why not indeed. Cynically, because they expect they'll get away with it. Legally because they declared the elections to have been vitiated/corrupted, and there's no other real recourse. I also saw some posts about how the court had secret information that Georgescu might have won if the election continued, so they just had to act to save Romania (and give their buddies another go at it, but that's just incidental :)
Unfortunately for her, Lasconi may have walked into a trap. After the first round of results was validated (by the same supreme court which now decided there was fraud lol) she aligned with PSD-PNL in a pro-European coalition. Now that Georgescu will probably be barred from running again, all the anti-system people might vote for Simion (from the far-right AUR) who backed Georgescu. Simion may or may not be controlled opposition, but is the preferred candidate for PSD's Ciulacu to go against in the second round. It seems quite possible that Lasconi will not make it to the second round again, especially if one believes the reports of PSD funneling some of their votes towards Simion previously.
The law on the President's term is quite self-contradictory. It could be argued that the current president's term ends when the new president is appointed.
An interesting tidbit is that voting had already started when this decision by the Supreme/Constitutional Court (CCR) came out.
Unfortunately, this is just the culmination of a series of events, which could maybe be traced as far back as the December 1989 revolution in Romania if I had the motivation for an effortpost. The joke being, Romanians haven't met a thing they couldn't steal, and these elections aren't even close to being the first.
For context, Romania's presidential election goes into a runoff second round with the top two candidates if no one has the majority of votes in the first.
After the first round results came out in favor of the far-right independent Georgescu and the opposition USR candidate Lasconi, I remember writing to a friend "no worries boss, this is Romania. Who do you want to win? We'll fix it, 'se rezolva.'" I wish my cynicism would have been slapped down just this one time, but you'll never be wrong being a cynic about Romanian politics.
The accusations against Georgescu are paper thin; the intelligence report declassified by the sitting president Klaus Iohannis (of the center-left PNL currently ruling in a coalition with center-right PSD) mentions such ominous things as old accounts reactivating, some VPN usage, and no IP address sharing between the pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts -- which just proves how sophisticated and malicious those darn Russians are. Also, Georgescu maintains that he hasn't spent any funds on his campaign, but someone has been paying TikTokers for posting/reposting his videos. And that's it. That's all it takes to redo the elections. Yes, there's Democracy, but within limits.
This charade follows a recount of the first round of voting based on another weak claim of miscounting some votes (no such claims were accepted by the court for the parliamentary elections where much more solid proof of fraud was provided -- but then again PSD-PNL won those elections so no biggie). Unfortunately the recount did not provide satisfactory results, so we have come to this.
As you'd expect, the current Supreme court is composed of all PSD appointees, since they have in one form or another been in power for 95% of the time since the 1989 revolution. Now, of course Georgescu is very pro-Russian, and may even have been supported by them. But I doubt any future elections will be restarted if evidence came out that Russians paid off some influencers to post videos of the PSD-PNL candidates.
All this makes me glad to have left that place. "Romania is a beautiful country; it's just too bad it's inhabited."
Edit TL;DR: the incumbent coalition didn't make it to the second round, so to save democracy from the Russians they had to restart elections. Next time make sure to vote better
An earnest love letter about what Donald Trump could become. What America could be. Will he live up to the expectation?
the bullet was actually divine intervention and God is winking at us
The point is that Trump is history, he is the main character of the world, he's the Avatar of America.
is everyone enjoying their run through the simulation?
For posterity, I was thinking about Sleeper Agents, https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 and more recent developments like AdvBDGen: https://x.com/furongh/status/1846999547836264459
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