Goodguy
12hr ago
No, it's more like an attempt by you to satisfy yourself emotionally. To score points fairly you would have to distinguish between feminists who support fundamentalist Islam and feminists who do not, and you show no signs of wanting to do that even though I am sure you understand the distinction.
Sure, many people are ok with giving Hegseth, Miller and Trump the AI technology. But that doesn't make it a good idea. And even if they think that trusting Trump with the tech is a good idea, as opposed to thinking it's not but wanting the money anyway, that still does not mean that trusting Trump with the tech is a good idea.
I might be misunderstanding your argument, though.
Goodguy
1d ago
I agree. Since I dislike both of the major power groups, I desire to balance them against each other. If I do vote for a Democrat in the midterms, it's very unlikely that this will be the start of some kind of long commitment to the Democrats on my part. And it's possible that I will vote for some Republicans in some local elections. But I do want to give the right a slap that tells them to stop the overreach and the deranged rhetoric, similar as how Trump getting elected in 2024 gave a slap to the woke telling them to cut out their overreach and deranged rhetoric.
I don't need a security clearance to feel very confident, based on following geopolitical events and the overall state of known global technology, that the chance of a significant number of missiles hitting American soil is small, at least as long as the government does not go too far in antagonizing nuclear powers, in which case all bets would be off. But I think the chance of nuclear war is small simply because national leaders are usually more averse to risking their own lives than the lives of soldiers or random civilians.
The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD
Yes, but they want Anthropic to help humans not be in the loop. This is understandable from a military perspective, but it's understandable for Anthropic to be hesitant to help an administration that constantly uses reckless rhetoric with it.
As for TDS, I don't think I have it. I think I've been pretty fair to Trump and his people over the course of the last ten years. I have often defended them from some of the less just accusations that have been made against them. If I had TDS, I probably would have voted for Harris in the last election instead of doing what I did, which was vote for neither Harris nor Trump.
But despite my lack, as far as I can tell, of TDS, people like Hegseth, Miller, and Trump himself are disturbing me more and more lately with their rhetoric.
Goodguy
1d ago
I have never voted for either a Democrat or a Republican either in midterm elections or in Presidential elections, and this recent stuff with Anthropic is making me consider voting for the Democrats in the midterms even though normally I hate the Democrats as much as I hate the Republicans.
Goodguy
1d ago
Well like I said, big capitalist enterprises are sometimes woke when it comes to social issues. But Trump is implying that Anthropic's objections to what the Defense Department wants to do with its technology are based on radical left, woke motivations, and the evidence as far as I can see does not support that implication.
I do not think that Pete Hegseth is a normal person. To me he comes off as a weirdo of some kind, either a dogmatic ideologue or an opportunist. At very best, a cartoonish stereotype of a military person. Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that. The normal nuclear deterrence works. And someone like Pete Hegseth seems to me like a very sub-optimal person to put in charge of national defense.
Trump went on TruthSocial earlier and called Anthropic radical left and woke. That's the level of nonsense coming from this administration right now.
Anthropic is a big capitalist enterprise, for one thing. Now, sure, big capitalist enterprises can be woke when it comes to social issues. But calling Anthropic woke for its current posture is nonsense. Anthropic has two main objections to what the government wants. First, it does not want its tech to have autonomous control over weapons. Second, it does not want its tech used for domestic surveillance. Neither of these objections have anything to do with woke ideology, unless you think that it's woke to want humans in the loop of controlling weapons and to have the civil liberty of privacy.
Amdoei's supposed reaction is understandable if he, as I do, believes that giving any weapons technology to this administration without oversight might be like giving fireworks to a toddler without oversight. Would Amodei really object to the technology autonomously preventing hypersonic missile attack? I doubt it. But he has an understandable reason to not encourage the Pentagon to expect too much from Anthropic.
The administration's over-the-top, blustering, and uncharitable reaction to Anthropic's refusal is just more evidence that Anthropic is right to refuse. There is good reason to be careful about giving weapons to people who are either genuinely emotionally unstable like some of the people in the administration seem to be, or are pretending to be emotionally unstable to score political points.
Goodguy
1d ago
Hegseth just posted bunch of seething on Twitter: https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070.
To me, his argument seems to reduce to this sentence: "Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military." He means Anthropic by "their".
It is clear that Anthropic has no means to seize veto power over the decisions of the US military.
And to me at least it is clear that the Anthropic-US gov standoff cannot be characterized as an attempt by Anthropic to seize veto power over the US military.
Does Hegseth actually believe this claptrap? Or is he writing for the low-IQ audience? In either case, I don't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
I feel like you might be giving Hegseth too much credit for having some sort of principled desire to give the US the tools to resist China.
His motivations might be much simpler. He might be a true believer, someone who genuinely thinks that, as long as the US government is being run by a "real American patriot" (on his side, of course), the US government should have the power to conduct any level of surveillance it wants to against any individual whatsoever, and to use autonomous weapons to kill anyone the leadership decides to kill, at any moment. Sort of like a real-life version of Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, just without the charisma and perhaps also without the intelligence or the principles.
Goodguy
5d ago
I have seen no reason to believe that Bill Belichick was denied getting into the hall of fame this year because of his relationship with Jordon Hudson. I am not even sure that Hall of Fame voters would care about that. For example, Peyton Manning was voted into the Hall in 2021 despite sexual assault and performance enhancing drug use allegations against him. The NFL's culture usually isn't very sensitive to stuff like this.
I like to eat pretty healthy and between that and not liking to spend much time on food, I tend to spend more money on food than I would like to.
I wonder if there is a really low-risk way for someone like me, who has a middle class income and no disabilities, to get government money for food.
I don't have much guilt about the idea of grifting the government, on the principle of "if they don't spend the money on me it's more likely than not that they will waste the money". Besides, government policy is probably partly responsible for the general low quality of American food and the fact that quality food tends to be niche and pricy.
One of my takeaways from the last few years is that both sides of the American culture war bark a great deal but have very little bite.
At the start of 2021, surely several million Americans, if polled, would have told you that the Presidential election had just been stolen from them by a deep state cabal. What happened as a result? One almost entirely unarmed act of trespassing into the Capitol building. This even though many of those several million were already heavily armed and most of the rest could have easily become heavily armed if they had wanted to.
Now in 2026, several million Americans, if polled, would tell you that Trump is erecting a fascist regime and that ICE are stormtrooper goons who are being turned into Trump's personal army and are waging a racist war against brown people. What has happened so far as a result? One or two incompetent armed attacks on ICE. Zero successful ones, even though it would be easy for most Americans to buy weapons and it's probably not hard to figure out how to kill a few ICE agents.
Goodguy
17d ago
Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.
Not if they are very good at getting other people's kids to join.
Goodguy
17d ago
It is currently the top story in Google News when I look at it in browser incognito mode to prevent it from showing stories tailored for me (to the extent that is possible despite browser fingerprinting).
It is currently the top story in the New York Times' World section.
It is also currently the top story in the Washington Post's World section.
Goodguy
18d ago
Sure, they shouldn't be surprised by it. My point is just that an Iranian attack would not be some Pearl Harbor style surprise attack.
The US unilateral ceasefire is in my opinion meaningless since it seems clear to me that in reality the US reserves the right to bomb Iran whenever it chooses, and if it chooses to do so will just come up with some narrative about how it was justified despite the supposed ceasefire. At most the ceasefire just means that the US would wait a bit between spinning up the narrative and launching the actual attack, in order to make it look as if it had observed the ceasefire.
Goodguy
18d ago
Wait, why would Iran have to declare war for it to not be a perfidious surprise attack? The US government recently bombed Iran, so Iranian retaliation would not be a strike out of the blue.
I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.
People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.
Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.
The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.
Goodguy
21d ago
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
Goodguy
22d ago
There is definitely some reason to think that Epstein was not just some "random rich lech", as @ABigGuy4U phrased it. However, here's what I do not understand about the "Epstein was doing blackmail for an intelligence agency" theory: if he was, why was his spycraft so poor? My understanding is that Ghislaine Maxwell would often approach random teenage girls in public and offer them money for supposed massages. Epstein and Maxwell would even get girls to go recruit other girls for them. If that is indeed how they operated, to me it seems like an incredibly risky way of running a blackmail operation. Surely if you have access to enormous funding there must be safer ways to procure underage girls than to approach random American girls in public locations. And if this wasn't part of the supposed blackmail operation - if Epstein was both running a blackmail operation and occasionally having sex with random American girls just for the fun of it - well, if I was the person ultimately in charge of the operation, I would either get him to stop running these risks or I would shut the whole operation down. There is just no need to pluck American teenage girls off the Florida and NYC streets for a blackmail operation. A wealthy man could surely get all of the underage girls he could possibly need for blackmail from countries where procuring them is less risky. Unless, I suppose, having sex with specifically first-world women was part of his clients' fetish. But even if that was the case, I'm sure that there are safer ways to get American girls than what Ghislaine is said to have been doing.
I noticed this too. Maybe he used good grammar and spelling when writing formal documents to his finance associates and used bad grammar with his friends and cronies. Many people who met him described him as bright and charismatic even back in his younger years before he was famous, so I figure that these emails can't possibly capture the full extent of his communication skills.
Goodguy
29d ago
Got it. I think I misunderstood what you were saying. The way you phrased it, "foreign agents", made me think that you were implying that the protesters are working alongside of or at least furthering the aims of foreign governments. Which would parallel certain accusations against Trump and his people.
Goodguy
29d ago
Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”.
Sounds exactly like what many people would say about the January 6, 2021 rioters.
Goodguy
30d ago
Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years.
There are tens of millions of adults in the United States who are either completely unemployed or work part-time, and are not students.
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Let's break it down:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone.
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery.
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
Vetting processes for new joiners.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups).
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
Home-base coordination points.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
If you wanted to murder ICE agents and film it, you'd want to shoot them from a distance while you or someone else filmed it. You wouldn't want to get into a conversation with them while standing 1-2 feet away from them like in the video I linked. That would make it unnecessarily harder to draw your gun successfully and to escape.
There is no world leadership of feminism, no feminist constitution. You are talking about feminism as if it is a monolith. This is simply not an accurate view of reality.
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