Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Pretty quiet week for me, but then again I'm focused on events that could escalate. The South Korea martial law declaration was poorly executed (compare with the 1981 Spanish coup), and overall I thought it wasn't a big deal. Maybe I'm just desensitized. As the Lebanon front closes a new front emerged in Syria, which seems like a bigger deal (because it's a bigger country), but nothing decisive has happened there yet.
Russia moved some assets outside Syria, perhaps suggesting that it will not reinforce Assad.
United Healthcare CEO assassinated
Meta plans to build $10B spanning undersea internet cable for its exclusive use.
Hezbollah fires the first missiles since ceasefire
Estonia launches large-scale NATO exercises near border with Russia, together with France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Latvia. I like Estonia and consider them competent.
Catholic bishop attacked and robbed in Sudan, by the RSF. Meanwhile the pope calls for peace
Marburg virus has been spreading a bit. I previously was vaguely paying attention to it, but now it's come up often enough that I'm more actively tracking it.
UK orders 5M doses of H5 vaccine
China state news point out how the US has repeatedly promised and failed to provide security to Africa.
Pakistan army kills some jihadist insurgents
The South Korea military law declaration seems like a nothingburger.
Syrian conflict continues.
Flu-like disease kills 143 in Congo.
French prime minister resigns. Unclear if Macron (President) will hang on to power.
Meanwhile, Senegal and Chad asked France troops to leave. France presence in Africa has declined a lot over the last few years.
China banned exports of various raw materials to the US.
Interesting comment about the undersea cable. It's no Starlink, but that level of infrastructure in the hands of a private company is somewhat unprecedented.
The Chinese export ban seems like the most important item here. They are dominating manufacturing and control much of the raw resources, so this is a direct and preemptive attack on Trump's promise to raise tariffs on Chinese goods.
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Meanwhile I'm still running my little intelligence agency, and we keep putting out weekly minutes (of which stuff like the above is my draft for Thursday). Today I was very frustrated because someone wants to give us a grant but their ops is fucked up and so we might have to pay $5k in overhead basically just because. On the plus side, my cofounder has been doing very fast wargames for the items in this list and these have generally been very enlightening, because they make it much easier to think through what the "obvious steps" are in catastrophes like that in a way that more abstract thinking doesn't do it for me.
Yesterday I posted a blogpost on the "grain of truth problem", where you can't really update well if you observe something which you previously thought had probability ~0—many of the big picture frameworks people use to make sense of AI have fail and imho will continue to fail because they are too rigid. I put it on twitter, but it failed to reach anybody with real power.
/end of rant.
Maybe it is just me but that font is unusable for prose for me. Maybe it would work for code.
also "proffessional life" and "problme"
Also, for bold predictions about new unprecedented field I would expect basically all detailed predictions to fail. And I would not treat that as giving much info.
(posted this nitpick as you complained about no reach and maybe this has some sort of influence on this, or maybe no - let me know if that was unwanted)
Thanks, typos fixed
Also changed the font to something which might be a bit better
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