2rafa
17hr ago
He can think about the consequences of his technological innovation on society. This is something we ask of many creators; it is fair to ask Mark Zuckerberg if he thinks social media is harmful or what should be done about its negative impact on children or whoever (and indeed this is something Meta at least pretends to care about)
2rafa
17hr ago
Stop being vague and start thinking about specifics. If there’s going to be UBI, how is it going to be paid for, how is it going to be distributed, how do the economics of the whole thing work?
AGI euphoria promoters have been much more vague about the post revolution economy than even Marx was in the mid-19th century. “Yeah man everyone will get their $2k a month in welfare bux, you will live in a nice pod and crochet all day or something, this will all happen with minimal social upheaval and the economics will work themselves out”.
2rafa
17hr ago
Oh, and you’re 80 years old and easily impressionable. This is the capability of Mossad, plus infinitely more.
Why does responsibility not lie with Trump / Hegseth etc here, or even Americans who voted for someone allegedly so easily manipulated? It’s very much “the Tsar’s advisors are the real problem”.
Imagine the best salesmen in the world working for years to figure out how to sell you something.
The best salesmen in the world are working right now to sell you Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Fanduel, Kalshi, day trading, laundry detergent, whatever. That doesn’t mean one can’t criticize the lifestyle decisions of gluttons, gamblers and spendthrifts.
2rafa
18hr ago
It increases it hugely during a conflict. Afterwards the incentives change, especially after a very shameful US withdrawal / unilateral cessation of hostilities, in which case the smart move for them is to complete the bomb, display it publicly, make clear there are many spares distributed across hardened underground facilities, and so a state of nuclear MAD has been reached with Israel.
Twelver Shias really do have a millenarian eschatology but I don’t think that says much about how likely they would be to use that nuclear weapon. In addition, there would be a price to pay for breaking the 80 year nuclear taboo diplomatically, including with Russia and China (since a successful wartime use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly lead to Poland, Japan and others getting the bomb, which is contrary to the political desires of those states).
Lastly, it’s unclear that a nuclear attack on Israel, depending on scale, would 100% be the end of Israel or (viable) Zionism. It might well be, and presumably this theory involves the subsequent storming (after the deaths of 800k+ Israelis) of the country from multiple sides by an army of angry Muslims, both ‘axis of resistance’ and otherwise Sunnis from Egypt, Syria etc just caught up in the nature of things. But it also might not, Israel would retaliate with nuclear attacks, the population is well armed, it’s possible the US could intervene, there could be a period of anarchy before a Jewish state of a kind is restored, there a number of scenarios.
So certainly it increases the chance, yes. But I don’t think that a regime that survives intact under, say, Khamenei’s son will necessarily do it. That an Iran that survives will get nuclear weapons though is inevitable, surely.
If the war is called off now, the IRGC will press to finish developing nuclear weapons, engage in an extraordinary program of domestic repression and ultimately emerge as the much firmer, more cemented, and even more indisputable ruling elite of Iran. Will they nuke Israel after a cessation of hostilities? I doubt it. If there is a nuclear attack it will happen during a long war of at least several months, probably a rough or dirty bomb using the current 60% enriched material, put together quickly over a month, smuggled into Israel, Dubai, or somewhere else by an IRGC remnant unit operating under limited central authority. Someone like Pezeshkian wouldn’t even know about it until it happened.
The problem is, all of that might happen anyway, underscoring what a poor decision this war has been so far. As I said, there was only one chance to do this and it would have been while 2m+ Iranians were protesting, take out the leadership, police stations, basij, IRGC hubs, then hope that the institutions get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of human movement before anyone regroups, and then bring in US forces to ‘defend’ the (counter)revolution either overtly or quietly. Doing it after all the most aggressive / low inhibition protestors have been killed is pointless, a bunch of scared middle class people in Tehran are now supposed to, what, message each other on Telegram and try to storm parliament, when there are 800,000 soldiers, some who care and some who don’t, and 150,000 deeply ideologically committed IRGC fighters out to avenge their spiritual leader?
Broadly I agree with that kind of two state solution but it’s also very explicitly against the absolute antizionism embedded in the foundation of the Islamic revolution, in which any Israeli state ie ‘Zionist entity’ is illegitimate; this was the Iranian position even when in the late 1980s and early 1990s a two state solution that involved the removal of most Jewish settlements was on the table.
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