domain:felipec.substack.com
functor
1hr ago
The US is swimming in debt, is deeply divided and is being overtaken by China. The US is far less ahead than it was 50 years ago. Most of the countries in the region trade more with China than the US. The US portion of global GDP, population and military might is in decline. This is an awful time to get involved in forever wars containing direct ethnic cleansing over a tiny strip of desert.
Creating a giant refugee crisis on the border of Europe while impacting a bunch of countries in the middle east by engaging in mass ethnic cleansing is the worst PR imaginable.
philosoraptor
1hr ago
A few hard-left loudmouths, sure, but not the vast majority of people who think Israel needs to tone it down or just want a ceasefire, any ceasefire.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
It's something I've heard from people who work with classified information. I'm not advocating for all that to be declassified, because it's hard for a very large bureaucracy to make precise per-document decisions about what should and shouldn't be secret, so it makes sense to classify more rather than less. But it does mean that "USAID has classified documents" isn't something you can really draw inferences from like OP did without a lot more information.
Edited. I'm using 'interesting' as 'enjoyable to read'. That is, a good post is (a) something you want to read, and (b) something you gain by reading. Does that help?
There are some people who claim that they will never find anything that AI writes enjoyable simply because they know it's not produced by a human, but I think that's cutting off their nose to spite their face.
curious_straight_ca
2hr ago
But he undid the canada+mexico tariffs before they went into effect! I don't see how that's showing he's willing to eat the consequences.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Because they are the experts. In addition to @Capital_Room's posts, there's Scott's "On Priesthoods" that goes into this.
Let's take forestry. The amount of logging or controlled burns you can do in a year is regulated by the states' forestry departments. How do they determine this? They do the science thing: compile and analyze the historical data on forest recovery, seek the opinion of external experts in local and international academia and come up with a number: you can log at most X% of forests per year, you have to burn the protected forests every Y years, pest extermination requires Z dollars per year.
If a governor is lobbied by the loggers' union to increase the logging to X+M%, by the real estate developers and insurance companies to reduce the burns to once every 2*Y years, if he promises to cut down the spending on pest extermination by 50% and then tries to force the forestry service to do all this, then his actions are deleterious!
His job is to harmonize the constraints imposed by various experts, not to choose one set over the other for political reasons.
And it's the very people who used to bomb you and your children who'll envy you and seek to work under you.
But if you oppose us, the most powerful empire to ever exist, you shall be totally and utterly destroyed with no mercy.
If Israel wants to take Gaza over after it has been rebuilt it US would just give it to them, or give them extra aid to "buy" it with.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2hr ago
I think it has a non-negligible chance of happening. Trump is the new face of America that does not pretend to play by normal countries' rules. The United States is a super-hegemon, a nation not facing even any plausible threat of competent adversary. They can take what they want, the way China/Russia/Iran/etc would very much like to be able to do but can't on account of the United States existing. In front of this face, sovereignty of almost every other country is a bluff that's easy to call. Nobody can militarily oppose the US, and most people on the globe buy into American culture and vision more than into their own regimes and bureaucracies. Certainly that's true of Egypt.
The actual shape of the deal will be about cleansing Gazans and providing security to settlers, though. Securing Israeli interests is one of the foundational, terminal values of the US.
That's how it all started, 1918-1948, just with British as controllers instead of Americans. Clearly it didn't work out that way.
Jiro
2hr ago
I find that the concept of "interesting" is often used here and on DSL in toxic ways. It's too easy to call a post "interesting" when people are responding to it a lot because of its flaws, deliberate (for trolling) or otherwise (for AI). Well-argued is fine. Interesting shouldn't even be on the table.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2hr ago
Wikipedia is biased to the left. I wouldn't go to Wikipedia for information about whether it's correct to call something a conspiracy theory.
I can find multiple reputable, mainstream outlets referring to it as a conspiracy theory. It is still considered a conspiracy theory by vast swathes of the population, and many of those other claims were considered conspiracy theories by both the right and the left wing of politics. The NSA surveillance, for instance, was derided as a conspiracy theory by both sides of politics, as was the claim that Iraq didn't have WMDs (Tony Blair was ostensibly on the left). The rubric I actually use is "was I consistently called a conspiracy theorist for advocating this belief, and were others who espoused it similarly accused" and wikipedia was simply an additional piece of evidence (hard to provide evidence of quotes from in-person discussions two decades ago).
There are a lot of things that have a real definition, but are also abused to attack political opponents. "Conspiracy theory" is one just like "Nazi". Would you suggest that because Trump and the president of Ukraine are called Nazis, but I would not call them that, "Nazi" is a useless term?
I unironically do believe that nazi, like fascism, is largely a useless term in the modern day. It had a meaning, once, but now it is effectively just a snarl word and it isn't really possible to draw a consistent or useful meaning out of the word without context. In the last week alone I've seen Israelis get called Nazis who then turn around and call their opponents nazis for opposing them - the term no longer even necessarily implies antisemitism. You can still use the word in arguments, but if you do I feel like you should be obligated to let the reader know what you actually mean by it.
It communicates that it is a particular type of faulty reasoning.
Ok, what type? Can you actually provide a consistent definition that covers all the conspiracy theories I laid out in my first post?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
It's simple really, you don't live in a constitutional republic but in a managerial state where a conglomeration of organizations with various levels of ties to the State interlock in a bureaucracy that produces "government" and is usually called "democracy".
The President is but a cog in this complex machine. And so are elections. The EU works this way as well, and so does most of the West. The banking system is setup this way (FATCA, FED, etc), foreign policy is setup this way, pretty much everything is setup this way, even the army to some degree. As this conglomeration of NGOs, QUANGOs, private enterprises and government departments with various degrees of control over each other but a great deal of insulation from political control (this is usually called "independence").
When people talk about the "deep state", this is who they mean.
Jiro
2hr ago
He's not trolling because it's insane, he's trolling because in addition to being insane, it's a one shot off-the-cuff thing that he hasn't spoken about before, and in the case of past trolling, hasn't spoken much about afterwards.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
2hr ago
This is mildly amusing. Exactly the kind of idea that I like, biased against islam and in favor of the most simplistic solutions as I am.
If he actually does it, it'd be very surprising and finally an actual solution to that shitshow. Crude, undiplomatic, inhumane, politically incorrect, engendering hostility and outrage, and actually a solution, unlike what any of the legions of tactful diplomats and politicians were able to effect for the last seventy-odd years.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
You must just not hang out with ex-spooks and diplomats. This and NED is all they talk about.
I think it was in the Reagan era that someone figured that the US needed to move money about for national security and foreign policy goals and that doing it through QUANGOs and NGOs was a lot more efficient and plausibly deniable than whatever they did before then.
In a sense if you've never heard of it and the name sounds boring (and is misleading to what it actually does) that means the people involved are doing their jobs.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Because it's much harder to stop an EO that does X than pass a law that authorizes the executive to do the same. Trump's EO's are within the acceptable range of what the GOP in congress approves of, but they are not their preferred solutions.
TLDR: mod on content, not provenance.
A good post is enjoyable to read and it is well argued. Somebody who is using AI in some way to post more interesting, well-argued essays that they could write entirely by hand is improving the Motte, and should be encouraged. Using AI to post low-effort walls of text should be a bannable offence.
Specifically:
- AI-written or edited content should be labelled clearly.
- AI use should be considered a strong aggravating factor for low-effort or poor discussion, and should quickly escalate to bans if needed. The quality bar should be kept high for AI-adjacent content.
- Otherwise, do nothing.
Yes, this is subjective, but all of our rules are subjective. In practice, I trust the mods to handle it.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I don't for a second believe that there's any chance of that happening, or even that Trump really intends to do it. Trump likes extravagant opening bids that he then immediately backs down from - as we've just seen with Canada and Mexico.
He's saying something absurd to grab attention and so that he can barter down from it later. I do not take it literally or even very seriously.
satanistgoblin
2hr ago
Muslim countries won't accept the Gazans because that would collaboration with zionists, so more refugees for Europe...
Skibboleth
3hr ago
I am not convinced that Trump is serious about this. I get the impression he's trolling.
I feel like there's this consistent sanewashing two-step going on with Trump's behavior. Whenever Trump picks a pointless fight, he's demonstrating toughness and making people understand they have to take him seriously. Whenever Trump says something indefensibly insane, he's trolling... which signals that people shouldn't take him seriously.
If he actually manages to do it, which is silly to even contemplate and will never be allowed by Israel in a million years, it could be a very nice solution to this problem.
You just go in there, with the most powerful military in the world, and announce your intention.
We will give the profits of this special economic zone (minus a small cut for our protection), and a complete pardon, to any Gazans that sign up, to them in perpetuity and to their children. You will be as Saudis, as Emiratis, as Singaporeans, princes of one of the richest trading hubs in the world, friends of the United States. And it's the very people who used to bomb you and your children who'll envy you and seek to work under you. You will go from total destitution, to the richest people in the world.
But if you oppose us, the most powerful empire to ever exist, you shall be totally and utterly destroyed with no mercy.
Who wouldn't take that deal? Even if you're the head of Hamas, it's a damn good deal. The only flaw I see is that Americans have not exactly proven trustworthy, and that placing yourself at their mercy may not be the best of ideas. But Trump has a good pedigree here, what with the Abraham accords and the recent cease fire. He could make that personal commitment.
Jiro
3hr ago
Because I know what Internet pedants are like, and because even non-pedants will fake being pedants to score points, we need a use/mention clause. Using AI-produced material as an example when discussing the topic of AI, rather than to promote the ideas expressed in the AI-produced material, doesn't count.
Jiro
3hr ago
If someone does post AI because they have their own ideas, but can't express them well, they should be willing to stand by everything in their post. If they use AI, we should be entitled to assume that they edited out everything they don't agree with and that even if what's left isn't literally their own words, we can treat it as their own words.
Why do you think the Israelis spend so much money on AIPAC?
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