4bpp
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2d ago
"Women have no agency" may be fringe, but "the poor have no agency" is fairly mainstream. (I would reckon that acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts is far higher.) With regards to third-worlders, you could say the Kiplingpill was never actually fully removed from the diet.
4bpp
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4d ago
Well, the relevant question to ask is what algorithm the doctors were following and if there would have been one that they should have been following instead. Have there been cases, or plausible threats, of doctors getting into trouble for not performing a second test? I could imagine anti-abortion activists subscribing to a narrative along the lines of "liberal doctors have no intention of complying with the spirit of the law, so they will try to get around it by performing a single test with a high false negative rate to murder more babies", and going to look for cases that fit the pattern and demanding that compliant attorney generals prosecute.
4bpp
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5d ago
I think you might be underestimating the impact a niche movement can have on the memespace of a larger culture. Two Korean girls I know independently got married to Turkish guys (as a result of processes that can be rounded to "I heard somewhere that Turks are our kin, so I will go to Turkey and find one", starting out not knowing a single one), even though the Macro-Altaic hypothesis was by all accounts just a cute linguistic theory that has long since fallen out of fashion. Among African-Americans, I would wager there are more now who have Arabic first names while not being Muslims than Nation of Islam had members at its peak.
4bpp
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5d ago
Considering the gratuitous Egyptian theming in the former, is this somehow facilitated by Hotepism? (Egypt-related power fantasies slot better into the African-American cultural narrative?)
First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.
You are wording this as if the underlying intention behind arguing about the execution methods were necessarily just to muddy the waters, sabotage the discussion or otherwise manipulate the majority into accepting what you believe to otherwise be an unpopular proposition (categorical prohibition on the death penalty). It doesn't need to be. A significant strain of categorical opposition to the death penalty is based on the belief that it taints and corrupts the society that enacts it - every murder you performed, endorsed being performed in your name, watched and enjoyed conveys upon you (whether as a metaphysical taint or a mundane acceptance of killing and torture, which could contribute to antisocial behaviour in extremis) a bit more of the murderer nature, regardless of how deserving the target was.
To be concerned about this in principle is hardly the innovation of an overly soft modern society it is made out to be - in fact, there are examples of medieval societies all over the world forcing executioners and sometimes even butchers to live outside the city walls and forbidding them from freely mingling with regular citizens. But if your primary concern with the death penalty is the psychological effect it has upon law-abiding citizens and you don't have the political power to prevent it outright, it makes sense to at least argue about the ways in which executions may be performed: surely a drawn-out sadistic public spectacle feeds the bloodthirst more than sheepish and clinical backroom euthanasia.
...but Germans voted in Hitler, and Juan Carlos I sort of ordained a transition to democracy in Spain after Franco (if you squint). Outside of the low-N domain that is the political system of a country, there are even more examples of a house being dismantled using its master's tools, first and foremost the progressive takeover of positivist academia. What is entryism, even, if not an attempt to seize the Master's tools to have a go at the house?
(On the meta level, as a right-winger who is adopting this catchphrase, are you not also aiming to use the postmodernist Master's tool against his house - directly, and one step up the meta ladder in that you are in fact even copying the strategy of claiming that "the master's tools will never..." while aiming to employ the master's tools to that end yourself?)
4bpp
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6d ago
I never understood why this aphorism is a thing. It seems wrong both literally (in what setting that is not a video game do tools come with friendly fire proofing?) and as a metaphor (almost every successful revolution co-opts components nurtured by the system it overthrows). Are there reasons to keep it alive beyond some sort of postmodern appeal (it sneaks in the assumption that your opposition are akin to slaveholders, and appears to say authoritatively that you should reject "tools" on association with the enemy rather than on merit)?
4bpp
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7d ago
I continue thinking that to look at the life of rich celebrities and seek to derive any conclusions about what rules the rest of us ought to live by is foolish. Even if the data actually suggests that it was a mistake for people like him to not live by the Pence rule (and this hasn't been established - for every blob of drama like this, do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?), the data says nothing at all about whether an open marriage can work for any of the instances that don't fit this pattern, where the man is not an idol seen as holding the keys to a magic world of glamour or de facto bottomless affluence, the women are not secretly competing for exclusive access to this resource and there is no hovering media machine that would involve the whole world in the conflict for the promise of eyeballs.
What this seems to suggest is that bureaucratic hurdles are also downstream from the threat of legal costs, much like the explosion of US medical expenses (mediated by insurance and certification costs). Could one put a lid on "dentist caused cosmetic damage, courts awarded more in damages than the patient will earn in a lifetime" scenarios that the US is famous for? Should one, given the tension with the other apparent failure mode being like "courts fine megacorp the statutory maximum of $1m for illegal practice that earns them >$1m per interval between successful court cases in profit"?
How do you reconcile the goal of having credible threats with which to make institutions follow the law with the goal of not incentivising institutions to realign themselves around the goal of mitigating that threat? It seems that the fundamental problem is that regulation rarely changes the topography of the incentive landscape per se - it just places spike pits into certain attractive valleys in it, making the incentive-followers strive to get as close as possible to the edge of the legal sanctions pit while not crossing the line. To make sure they actually don't cross it, they introduce ever more procedural requirements - the more you have, the closer to the pit you can venture while still feeling safe. The optimal institution is just barely on the safe and legal side, and has a mile-long paper trail to prove it.
Maybe this suggests replacing "sharp-edged" bans with "terraforming" taxes. Only, how do you sell that to the voting masses? In the FDA example, this would have to look something like "instead of making the FDA/its employees subject to legal penalty if they pass some threshold of neglect in approving a drug that passes some threshold of side effects, tie their funding/salary to the volume of side effects", and, yes, accepting that some whistleblower will report a decision was made that looks like "yes, we figured some patients would get birth defects, but in expectation the funding cuts looked better than the amount of people we would need to divert to shepherd additional tests".
4bpp
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12d ago
politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism
...
Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Well, there's a natural modus tollens to consider when looking at the modus ponens there. It was expected that Latin-American immigrants would not stop voting in Latin-American politics after they came to the US. Now they're voting for Trump. Did they actually stop? Or is Trump actually more similar to Latin-American socialism than we expected?
It's kind of a matter of internet dissident lore how leftists cling to their mythos of being the anti-elite underdog and champion of the small and oppressed, even as their creed becomes the faith of rich and noble Brahmins yearning to defend their privilege. Perhaps more attention is due to how this is reflected on the other side - are rightists clinging to a mythos of being the noble elites of word and deed seeking to protect their rightfully earned place at the helm, but actually becoming the ideology of bombastic People's Tribunes promising to bring down the enemy elite and distribute gibs to their socioethnic clients? With some squinting, is the promise of Trump (imagined and played up by fans), distributor of free tendies, rewarder of loyals, crystalizer of traitors, not quite similar to that of a Perón, Bolsonaro or even (with identification filed off) Evo Morales?
4bpp
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12d ago
I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Ok.
So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Dugin
Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.
Sergeytsev
Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.
Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church
Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.
All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.
4bpp
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12d ago
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
There was nothing to argue with there - you said a thing that on its own means nothing other than "the principle constrains US actions less than you think it does" (which can mean anything from "the principle means sovereignty is absolute in all cases that are not the US attacking Serbia" to "actually the principle means nothing") and pointed at "decades of international law theory", which it is hardly reasonable of you to expect me to go read up on for the sake of this thread.
I don't get the sense that you really addressed my points at all. Can you spell out exactly what are the constraints on US behaviour that you believe result from this principle of sovereignty (not absolute) that the US adheres to? I understand that you predict in concrete terms that it will not physically attack German infrastructure even in the event of German rapprochement with Russia (of course assuming no additional contingencies), but that alone could be equally predicted from self-interest (an open attack could cause enough negative sentiment to reduce German cooperation with other US endeavours). Do you think the US would...
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...do it if they were assured that mainstream media in all involved countries will refuse to entertain the theory that the US did it?
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...provide material support to non-US actors to do it?
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...ignore and conceal (and instruct allies to do so) evidence they obtained that non-US actors would do it? (I think this represents a minimum of what they almost certainly did for NS2; even WaPo asserted the first part )
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...engage in economic warfare with the purpose of preventing operation of another country's infrastructure? (They explicitly threatened this for NS2.)
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...do any of the above with some other country, whose support may be less important for them than Germany's?
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...engage in other acts that are commonly seen as violations of sovereignty: arming and equipping a coup, funding a coup, funding opposition parties?
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...any of the above, for countries whose support is less important and/or can be sufficiently assured by the coup or opposition election succeeding? (If you say no here, I could bring such a wall of counterexamples that the discussion wouldn't really be worth having.)
And, is there some compact representation of what the actual principle is that I could apply to generate the same predictions myself without reference to "decades of international law theory"?
4bpp
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12d ago
I'm working on a VR game. For me, VR game development has recaptured some of the magic of indie games ca. 2005, before the whole scene got professionalised and commercialised to (un)death: the space of existing games is tiny (and so is the potential audience), so whatever vaguely new idea you have, chances are good that nobody has ever done it. You don't need to be a talented artist and animator, because the medium itself still has a certain "wow" factor like the first 3D console games did in the mid-'90s and has not been ground down by the hedonic treadmill. There are hardly any established "best practices" for interaction design either - instead of spending weeks to reproduce some deep local optimum of camera and input behaviour that has been iteratively refined by the industry over decades, you can try out any crazy idea you have and it probably won't be much worse than the typical existing game (and has a good chance of being better if you put some thought into it). Oh, and support in the major engines is a steaming pile of bitrot and performance regressions, so you can actually write bare metal code and not drown in FOMO over the SIGGRAPH-certified gimmicks and asset libraries you are missing out on (last I checked UE's Lumen-Nanite combo was still unusable in VR?).
There is a slight problem in that OpenXR (the only reasonably portable API) is somewhat overengineered and underdocumented, which is probably why there isn't really much of a user community for it, but so far I haven't encountered obstacles that couldn't be overcome with some gentle trial and error. It's slightly more unfortunate that its way of talking to the drivers is sufficiently weird that tooling like RenderDoc (indispensable program to record/profile/replay graphics API calls) can't work with it, so debugging also kind of has to be done like you are a primitive (ca. 2005) technology Youtuber.
Since the performance envelope is so tight, optimisation (for performance and appearance) also feels quite fun and rewarding, though your mileage might vary if you don't share a former ROM hacker's masochism. Over the course of the past 48 hours, I tried to improve a volumetric fog effect by reading (absence of data races not guaranteed) the depth buffer to clip each volume at solids already rendered, realised that I made an algebra error integrating the fog (nontrivial because I loathe wrangling FBOs and so am trying to do almost all objects as raytraced primitives) before, found that the wrong integral serendipitously happens to be in a family of integrals approximately equal to those of other fog functions that look decent, found that this all tanked rendering performance, and then more than recovered the loss by tweaking the drawing order and using the newly available depth buffer data to discard some fragments early.
Does anyone here have experience with hobby game development? How do you release your games? VR development is a wilderness, but not so wild that you can just throw up an FC2 homesite and hope that people will find your project. Are there still forums of the type where people would happily try out a half-baked game and give constructive feedback out there?
4bpp
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12d ago
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour, and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them. As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Supreme Court rulings that can be completely predicted by knowing the political alignment of the judges and valence of the possible rulings still come with a text, which you could think of as a sort of parallel construction, presenting the illusion that law is created by application of legal principles. This undoubtedly helps the peace-keeping function of national law (as the belief that procedurally impartial justice is available saps the will to take matters into your own hands), and I'm sure that the way that "decades of international law theory" tend to turn up afterwards whenever the US does what it must serve a similar function for those under its wing that wish to remain at peace with a situation they can't do anything about anyway. However, in a situation like this, at least those of us outside of the US are not actually so completely powerless that the best course of action is to believe whatever will make us the happiest. We're facing decisions that have some real impact on things like whether our country remains aligned with US goals and whether we personally help or subvert those goals every day, and for that purpose it would be useful to have a correct model of how the US would act in different situations.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure? Suppose I would not vote for them if I knew that this would happen, but I fall for the "sovereignty principle" as naively understood by me (and there's no doubt the cheerleaders are perfectly happy with me having this naive understanding!), or believe that the professed principles of European solidarity and mutual security assistance mean that if such a thing were to happen the other EU countries would help uncover and oppose it. They get elected by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles. Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
I think a significant tension in these debates that is seldom discussed explicitly is between the position that it is going to be inevitable that the hegemon (US) gets to bend/violate the principles a little and we should feel blessed with a hegemon that has been doing it so sparingly and judiciously on one hand, and the position that after a world in which 0 parties get to violate the principle the next best one is one in which 2+ parties get to on the other. I'm firmly in the second camp for what I'd like to think is a good assortment of reasons, while the majority of nuanced political thinkers in the West tends to be in the former. (There are of course also louder, and less interesting, positions, amounting to "the US never violated any principle, NATO is a defensive alliance, go back to your bot farm" and "America fuck yeah, cry about it". There isn't really much to discuss with the latter, and the former is hard to get through to.)
The difference usually boils down to questions of how sparing and judicious US violations really are, how reassuring it is to hope that they will always remain as sparing and judicious as they are now, and whether game theory does or doesn't mean that the understanding that the US alone could go on an unrestrained spree of conquest and meddling with impunity lets them reap many of the boons of doing so without actually having to transgress, much like nuclear-armed states reap benefits without ever firing a single nuke in anger.
I also tend to think that as a lowly civilian, my rulers facing adversity and competition is almost always good - if they can stand unopposed, they don't need to do anything for me, but if they are locked in a knife's-edge struggle with a mortal enemy, they are incentivised to buy my support lest I throw my minuscule worth in for the other side and tip the balance. ("For any German politicians reading this: Do I sound like a Putin bot? Are you afraid of losing the upcoming election to Putin bot parties? We can discuss terms!")
4bpp
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12d ago
Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence.
I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault). The reality seems to be that in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine Ukrainian is still offered as a first language at school at least as of last year (Russian MoE claims 43% chose it in Zaporizhia), while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it. I would assume this entails no education in it, either (and if you speak it a friendly language inspector might just ask you if you got a loicense for that). This is not a matter of "well, it's Ukraine, so the correct percentage is 100% Ukrainian", either; many parts of modern Ukrainian territory historically never spoke the Ukrainian language. (Should India be allowed to stamp out non-Hindi speakers because the name of the language is related to the name of the country?)
I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples - there are large minorities in almost every country neighbouring Russia that they have not made any particular moves to claim dominion over, and conversely the Russian interest in Ukrainian alignment exists without the language/ethnicity component. Do Australian threats against the Solomon Islands to prevent a Chinese base in their backyard suggest a desire for dominion over all English-speaking peoples, because the Solomonese happen to speak English?
4bpp
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12d ago
Is this not a principled choice by Zelensky, though? There is a particular Western memeplex that is easily glossed as "weaponised end of history". In this narrative, it is the West that is always willing to look at the present, call out evil and fight for good; and its enemies consist of a freak show of backwards beta loser powers that always invoke historical grievances and cringey national myths, which no enlightened democratic Chad would give a rat's ass about, to rationalise their desire to do more evil. This way of thinking clearly appeals to a significant portion of the Western audience - general Western media reactions to Putin's occasional rambling history lessons seem to come from the same playbook as the Kamala campaign "weird" ad to much better reception, and a particularly common use of the "whataboutism" meme may be glossed as "don't derail our discussion about what you are doing now by talking about what I did in the past".
Zelensky doesn't obviously need the audience that is unwilling to subscribe to this worldview, because the alliance of devout history-enders and Machiavellians can easily remain at the levers in the West as long as the fence-sitters stay put. He has little to gain from bringing up historical context, because historical context on the balance would not be kind to him - between the mess that was 2014-2022, the now largely forgotten gas disputes in the decades before it (which one may summarise as Ukraine stealing gas and being like "what are you gonna do, stop using our territory for transit?" about it) and the awkwardness surrounding how inextricable the literal Nazis and collaborators are from Ukrainian national identity even while none of their modern backers are quite willing to take the plunge and officially rehabilitate them, legitimising the view that history matters at at all would only risk growing the elements of the Western public that are tired of the war and would rather see their tax money and attention tokens redirected to morally more black-and-white issues.
4bpp
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14d ago
Well, there are some caveats there - if they are actually using homomorphic encryption to run the classifier, that means that Apple's servers do not at any point learn what the landmark is. If the goal is to report it to the FBI if a picture being sent has been labelled "child porn", accordingly, the phone would have to be wired up to report/send the image if the data it received, once decrypted, indicates that it was classified as such. How do you stop people from blocking this reporting functionality on their end? Adding additional user-unmuteable snitching logic to end-user devices comes with all sorts of legal, technological and security risks (and quickly puts you in a league with North Korean computing equipment that comes with daemons watermarking every document you touch, which they make it illegal to disable).
That being said, I see your argument at least insofar as the case for "it can't be done" is overstated and oversold, but I am not enough of an idealist to agree with this "just be truthful to the ruling classes and try to defend what you want on principle, the truth always wins in the end" thinking. I'm pessimistic about the prospect of a principled stand - we'll get the mandatory surveillance rectangle reporting on wrongthink eventually, because the powers-that-be really want it, and the majority of our fellow citizens probably already want it as well, or else the ruling classes will have all the opportunity on their side to manufacture the conditions that will make them want to, be it by propaganda, dissolving the cohesion of their opposition (note how effectively they split the tech anarchist scene into those who still want to keep the government out and those who think that the Nazis who want to keep the government out are the real danger) or creating real problems to which they are the solution (people want less government spying -> import scary foreigners into what to them is a scary foreign land -> old natives want more government spying to keep them safe from scary newcomers, newcomers want more government spying to keep them safe from racist natives). As far as I am concerned, the better choice at this point is just to lie and obstruct all the way. This buys time for some technical or societal deus ex machina solution to emerge, or else at least lets us spend a bigger fraction of our remaining time on this mortal coil out of bondage.
4bpp
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16d ago
Being jealous of your tribe's women is not exactly racism - it does not require ascribing any particular qualities to the people who take them other than that they are outsiders. Racism could then be used to rationalise why you find it bad that they get with a member of the outgroup rather than a member of the ingroup you have no particular relation to, but that's not what I was insinuating or talking about.
Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.
He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham. I'll admit I did not know about the number of other similar cases (I had only heard of one smaller one) until looking just now, though "hundreds of thousands" still seems unrealistic. (I'd guess maybe 50k as an upper bound for the last 40 years, which seems to be the time window over which the published counts run. Adding up numbers from all the cases I could find on Wikipedia gives about 10k total.)
Meanwhile, in the Savile case, Wikipedia cites the police as talking about 450 alleged sexual abuse victims, and allegations and semi-open discussion of it date back to the '90s. A particular paragraph goes
In 2007, Savile was interviewed under caution by police investigating an allegation of indecent assault at the now-closed Duncroft Approved School for Girls near Staines, Surrey, in the 1970s, when he was a regular visitor. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised there was insufficient evidence to take any further action and no charges were brought.[11] In 2012, it was reported that staff at the school had not been questioned about the allegations at the time.[28] A former headmistress of the school said she had been "hoodwinked" by Savile,[29] but described some of those who had brought the allegations as "delinquents".[30][31]
which really sounds quite similar - and this was apparently going on for some 50 years and only was made part of the public record after his death. Between the circumstance that apparently a single person can perpetrate abuses of this scale unreported, the Epstein/royalty connections, other European high society cases such as Dutroux in Belgium, and the little contacts I had into the chav stratum of British society (back when I was a kid making friends in MMORPGs) and stories of sugar-daddy dating I heard from there, I can absolutely believe that a big portion of those teenagers and kids would have just been groomed by somebody else.
4bpp
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16d ago
Consider it another piece of evidence that NTR is the mind-killer. His meltdown looked like a fairly common instance of how men go down a negative thought spiral about their tribe's women being taken by the ethnic outgroup. (Using the anime culture term here might seem a tad basic, but that subculture still tends to produce some of the most unhinged demonstrations of these thought patterns in action. Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men.)
I'd reckon the same thousands of White British girls from low-human-capital backgrounds were sex-trafficked by old men who look like the cast of Top Gear long before the Pakistanis came along, but this would never inspire an emotional reaction from halfway across the internet. (One individual was seemingly single-handedly about 1/3 as prolific as the entire Rotherham gang, but who is fedposting about the BBC now?)
I continue to not understand why his fans assess him as a "very skilled writer and fairly smart". I was willing to grant that perhaps I was being distracted by the rambling/malapropisms/formatting and higher-IQ readers could see past the style (which he always claimed was a deliberate choice to... throw off writing analysis?) and see some spark of brilliance in the substance behind it, but the circumstance that, in what was by all accounts a parting shot in which he could no longer contain his righteous fury, he did not for a moment break with the style even as he went through an emotional outburst made me update in favour of it being genuine and him really being somewhat confused and verbally challenged.
4bpp
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16d ago
A breed with an army and a navy, or so it is said.
4bpp
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17d ago
So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.
Either way, even if we commit to the proton beam story, I don't quite buy it. Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard. There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.
Putting the focal point at a distance of hundreds of meters or even some kilometers from the emitter, rather than centimeters, would get you plasma foci that are either extremely stretched/washed out in the direction of the beam (especially considering atmospheric scattering and everything, the energy density at the focus will not be terribly different from the energy density a meter up or down the beam from it), or you would require massive emitters (so the incoming beams converge at a wide angle), which I doubt they would place at sea and would be very far beyond civilian technology levels for any sort of coherent beam, or you would require multiple distributed emitters with perfect stabilisation to have a strongly lit up intersection point of beams that are individually too weak to induce plasma, which I could maybe believe on land (but then military anti-air beam weapons would be much further along than they appear to be) but not on sea.
Based on this line of thought and the circumstance that the Tic Tac video had obvious and much-commented-on camera effects (features/"hair" that seemed to track sensor orientation rather than that of the putative object in the real world), I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR. Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes) can be just as easily chalked up to either metaphorical water-muddying by involved military (like, what if your superior orders you to add this detail when talking to the press?) or the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).
Eh, there's like two posters further down giving it some amount of credence. We've had bigger threads about the Tic Tac at the time, and my sense was that the vast majority do not buy either the UFO or the classified scifi tech theory. It's just less exciting to argue the same thing over and over again when the evidence for the theories is always of the same shape (US military whistleblower full of red flags, blurry or unclear video, lots of reported sightings surely must mean they can't all be wrong, friend-of-a-friend who is very smart and has access believes it), especially when the UFO/scifi believers aren't really anyone's outgroup.
(Though with the Tic Tac, I did actually have a favourite classified scifi tech sort of theory: US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings. Intended audience was China and/or funding agencies. Efficacy demonstrated by showing that even muggle US military were completely overwhelmed by it.)
Germany keeps the identities of those pardoned a secret, but a recent court case revealed that the number totalled 15 during Steinmeier's five-year tenure (2017-2022), or 3 a year.
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