MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
It matters because at some point, Western countries drank the kool-aid. They seem to actually believe that the rules themselves create the order, rather than understand that the rules exist as a fig leaf over what could be called an empire in some sense. But if the empire forgets that it is an empire it forgets that the perception matters. It forgets that it cannot maintain the order without imposing it. Furthermore, allowing people to get around the laws without consequences (and given the number of countries that have started recognizing Palestine after 10/7) it’s a tactic that lays bare the fiction. If you can get your way by causing civilians to die, and simply goad the people you don’t like into attacking you and you can force them to make “sad images on TV”, you get what you want.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
We are much more causality adverse than we were. The D-Day invasion alone cost something like 5,000 men, and that was a single battle in a four year war effort. We wouldn’t tolerate such losses today. When 2,000 died over the course of a year in the occupation of Iraq, people in congress started calling for an end to the war. A large scale war like WW2 would mean an Iraq war level of causalities twice a day.
And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective. If you can hide among civilians, forcing your enemies to destroy civilians and houses, temples, and city streets, the west will take your side. Knowing this, you effectively can neutralize the enemy’s ability to defeat you by causing the BITV syndrome— they won’t fight if it means that people at home will be seeing women cry, because the civilians running the military won’t stand for it. So you either go in with small teams and hope you get lucky, or they win.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I mean technically by the definition of this list, any pro-Palestinian protest is by definition antisemitism as the central claims are Israel as colonial power ethnically cleansing the Palestinians and at current commuting a genocide. I don’t see how you could have a “kosher” pro-Palestine position that doesn’t run against these rules. I mean I think the most you could say is “Israel should turn on the electric grid” or something. And that’s probably not mild enough.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think the Zelensky thing is actually misunderstood. What Trump and Vance were doing was asserting control. Zelensky was used to dealing with Biden and the Left and having the USA government roll over and hand him several billion dollars. In the clip, the entire point is making it clear to Zelensky that he’s not in charge anymore, and that if he wants the US to help him, he has to accept our terms — which all told, and given the circumstances Ukraine is in, are actually pretty generous. But unless the people running the country actually assert themselves m there’s no reason to take it seriously.
I would say the same for the deep state. The reason to go in and pause payments and force people to prove they’re working is two-fold. First, the obvious benefit of cutting the fat. It needs to be done. But the other benefit is that it puts the deep state in its place, where it is on notice that it serves the elected government, and the days when they could simply roll their eyes and ignore the government are over and you better get with the program.
If you want to make actual changes in how things are done, you cannot be timid or nice about it. If you show weakness, you’ll be walked all over. Better to be overbearing but get the job done than be weak and try to explain in four years why nothing of note has changed. And I think most of this posturing now will pay off later. Iran and Syria and Hamas are watching Trump and Zelensky. They know they’re no longer dealing with Sleepy Joe who will maybe pretend to be bothered by what they’re doing but be too weak to do anything but tut-tut while they walk all over him. Trump, and thus the USA are done being the teat the world suckles while getting nothing in return, and are done being openly disrespected.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think this is about right. In most things, the option taken by the USA and NATO have been the ones good for themselves. Amazing that China can build concentration camps in their country and depopulate large swathes of Muslim majority and we can’t seem to muster the energy for a strongly worded statement. Of course, they do most of our manufacturing, so economic sanctions are bad for business.
I think the honest truth about war politics like all other political issues is that it’s Machiavellian — the point is to empower yourself and your allies , while perhaps weakening your enemies. The rest, as far as im concerned is propaganda for the democratic masses so they keep voting for the wars you want to fight. Being the good guys helps you to get the masses to support military adventures abroad. Especially when you’re telling them, again, that the regime needing change is doing the bad guy things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think at some point, we’re talking about angels dancing on pins. Thought and thinking as qualia that other being experience is probably going to be hard. I would suggest that being able to create a heuristic based on information available and known laws of the universe in question constitutes at least an understanding of what the information means. Thinking that fighting a creature with higher STR and HP stats than your own is a pretty good child’s understanding of the same situation. It’s stronger, therefore I will likely faint if I fight that monster. Having the goal of “not wanting to faint” thus makes the decision heuristic of “if the monster’s statistics are better than yours, or your HP is too low, run away.” This is making a decision more or less.
A kid knows falling leads to skinned knees, and that falling happens when you’re up off the ground is doing the same sort of reasoning. I don’t want to skin my knees, so I’m not climbing the tree.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
Yeah, that’s the thing I keep seeing, and frankly I agree with, especially since it’s been the dominant moral theme of a replacement for Christian morality. The thing is that for a long time, Hitler was Satan of a new religion in some sense with things like fascism, religious zealotry by Christians (Islam gets a pass here), bigotry, and prudishness as major sins.
And this version of the story has been used countless times to justify our own wars of aggression, or intervention in purely domestic affairs or civil wars. It’s been the cause to force globalization, migration, DEI, LGBTQ, and other social and economic realignments on people. And it’s been used to keep countries in line. For 75 years, if your country was accused of being fascist in some way, at the least you’d be cut off from trade, and at worst bombs would be+heading your way.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I have a different thought. I think it’s because people have misunderstood “turn the other cheek” to mean “be a doormat”. There were plenty of times in Christian history in which Christians would have absolutely gone to war to defend themselves or other Christians. I see it as us being victims of our own success — we haven’t (at least in Europe) been persecuted seriously in the last 500 years, so we have adopted a “just be nice” approach that others (particularly the Jews) have been persecuted out of. Jews know what happens when they ignore persecuted Jews.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
What I mean by thinking strategically is exactly what makes the thing interesting. It’s not just creating plausible texts, but it understands how the game works. It understands that losing HP means losing a life, and thus if the HP of the enemy and its STR are too high for it to handle at a given level. In other words, it can contextualize that information and use it not only to understand, but to work toward a goal.
I’m not saying this is the highest standard. It’s about what a 3-4 year old can understand about a game of that complexity. And as a proof of concept, I think it shows that AI can reason a bit. Give this thing 10 years, a decent research budget, I think it could probably take on something like Morrowind. It’s slow, but I think given what it can do now, im pretty optimistic that an AI can make data driven decisions in a fairly short timeframe.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
To put the obvious counterpoint out there, Claude was never actually designed to play video games at all, and has gotten decent at doing so in a couple of months. The drawbacks are still there: navigation sucks, it’s kinda so, it likes to suicide, etc., but even then, the system is no designed to play games at all.
To me, this is a success, as it’s demonstrating using information it has in its memory to make an informed decision about outcomes. It can meet a monster, read its name, knows its stats, and can think about whether or not its own stats are good enough to take it on. This is applied knowledge. Applied knowledge is one of the hallmarks of general understanding. If I can only apply a procedure if told to do so, I don’t understand it. If I can use that procedure in the context of solving a problem, I do understand it. Clause at minimum understands the meaning of the stats it sees: level, HP, stamina, strength, etc. and can understand that the ratio between the monster’s stats and its own are import, and understand that if the monster has better stats than the player, that the player will lose. That’s thinking strategically based on information at hand.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
In much of Europe, the police are more keen to arrest people who criticize Refugees especially Islamic ones, and speak against trans no matter the context. In liberal countries where there’s more protection for free speech, the punishment mostly comes down to being black listed and fired.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
Look around the falling European Union that’s rapidly islamifying and witnessing a rapid decline in quality of life. I mean, rape gangs are kind of a red pill on the whole thing.
The right simply has to point out that liberalism is brining about a decline in health, safety, freedom, and standards of living. Everywhere. Liberals have to keep coming up with excuses as to why it keeps happening.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
Outcomes are results, but results are not a strategy, nor are strategies predictive devices in and of themselves. Strategies entail predictions, but equating the two is a compositional fallacy, believing what is true of a part of a thing is true of the whole of the thing. Even ignoring that potential fallacy, believing that results falsify a process (strategy) that leads to them is a first-order mistake. It is a common mistake, particularly among the sort of people who believe that a strategy that fails is axiomatically a falsified strategy, but this is a bad axiom. And like bad axioms in any field, anyone whose theoretical understanding of a field rests on bad axioms is building their understanding on poor foundations, whether the user acknowledges it as an axiom or not.
I think this is simply a weird position to take, as it makes assessment impossible. If the assumptions are wrong, the strategy is based on faulty premises and won’t actually produce the kinds of results that you expect. If I think Russia is on a mission of global conquest, then a strategy based on containing Russia and challenging them at every step makes sense. But if that’s not true, then that strategy will not work. If I’m basing my strategy on assumptions about Russia being weak, they do not work on a strong Russia.
So if the strategy doesn’t work, obviously it’s a mistake somewhere in the base assumptions made, and until those assumptions are corrected, nothing you do can succeed. If you take the position that “just because I’m not getting the expected results doesn’t mean there’s a problem in my assumptions,” self correction is impossible. You’ll just do this same strategy even harder as though if you just try hard enough the strategy will work. On what other basis would you judge the worth of the strategy?
This is much easier to see when politically loaded topics are substituted by less political topics, which can be done by some basic coding to produce less politically contentious analogies that rest on the same argument structure and axiom of outcome-falsifies-strategy.
Okay, so like in football, you make a strategic approach to the game by saying “this team is good at pass rushing, so let’s focus on running. If they’re catching your running backs for loss of yards every time, it’s simply stupid to say that the strategy is just fine. Any high school coach would probably change strategies after the first quarter because the point of the strategy is winning the game, and the strategy is not leading toward winning the game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
A lot of the pro-Trump/pro-deal faction on here like to describe themselves as realists and pat themselves on the back for understanding Realpolitik and not being squishy idealists. It seems to me, though, that the Realpolitik goes in the other direction. Russia is our biggest foreign military threat, and is the biggest threat to our allies as well. While I'd prefer a world in which they didn't invade Ukraine, they've proven both that they are too incompetent to score a quick victory and too bullheaded to call off their dogs. For their part, the Ukrainians don't seem to have any interest in capitulating.
Our biggest potential rival is China not Russia, and the battle will likely be over Taiwan not Ukraine. So we’re fighting the wrong war from the realist point of view. My concerns for the future are refugees from MENA flooding Europe and North America, a wider MENA war, and China making a play for Taiwan (which is a major high tech manufacturer, including critical computer chips). Ukraine is not a critical country here. Russia isn’t a strong enemy, they have a lot of mineral and oil wealth, but they aren’t a modern country with a modern economy and military. They’re only relevant because they have a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, if it hadn’t been invaded is not a prize. It’s a corrupt country full of farmers. It has no critical industries, it secures no border, it’s just there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think making Ukraine (and Europe in general) something the Europeans solve for themselves is good for both parties. America simply doesn’t have the resources to put hundreds of billions into Europe when there are lots of hotspots popping up across the globe. It doesn’t work logistically. But at the same time, I don’t think it works for European countries who have become extensions of American foreign policy in their own territories. They really don’t have a strong enough military to deal with European military threats because the assumption has always been “we don’t need to be ready for war because Americans will defend us.. We can’t do that, even the USA probably doesn’t have the manpower to fight in Taiwan and Eastern Europe at the same time. Add in a flare up in MENA and you’re asking the impossible.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I mean it’s possible he does. On the other hand, for the left, I don’t see them putting anything new forward. They don’t have anything to put up against him. The best offer they have is “do you hate Trump? How would you like to go back to the good old days of … Joe Biden?” I think you’d have to break quite a lot of things for Joe Biden to look good by comparison.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I don’t see thins as a great political strategy. Yes, you do need to fall in behind a coalition. But paying more attention, this is no way to get people to actually do that. There are no agendas on offer. They aren’t even play acting like they have a serious agenda. The6 certainly don’t have a candidate of note. What they have is what failed them before— orange man bad. They’ve added Musk on the top, but it’s still “vote for us, we aren’t those people.”
The problem is that Trump isn’t bad enough for this to work. Whether you agree or not, the worst things you can say about him are things that are positive. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do, and he’s taking a sledgehammer to the federal government and cleaning up redundant positions. It just doesn’t work to make an entire political party be the anti-Trump when you can’t actually make a case that he’s doing something wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find. What it has is a thought that this will get attention and thus the grievances will be known and get attention. This seems to point to twin solutions of making targets harder to hit (schools are no longer the easy targets they were in the 1990s) by limiting access and slowing movement, and limiting the reach and saturation of the story; not giving the shooter notarity, not speculating on the motive, avoiding sensationalized reports of the carnage, focusing on the victims and their stories.
It’s always seemed to me that when a person reaches a point of dispair and rage at the society he believes is the cause, he tends to use the methods that the current system talks about the most. In the USA, it’s guns and sometimes vehicles. In Europe, it seems to be knives, bombs, and vehicles. You don’t see random bombings in the USA, even though they’d probably work to some effect. You don’t see guns in Europe.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think context matters here. I’m generally in favor of enforcing fair trade more so than free trade for tge simple reason that some countries are protectin* their industries from competition and therefore it’s not always fair trade. This isn’t always bad, as a sane economic policy would tend to protect industries that are either in early development, or of vital importance to the country. The issue I have with the tarries is that I fear they are too short term to do anything good — the minute a neoliberal government is established in the USA, those tariffs are gone. No one is therefore going to invest in American manufacturing if he thinks that import policy will revert to the old way in which it’s much cheaper to build the factory in a third world country and import it.
I think having some manufacturing in the USA is good and should be supported with tariffs. It provides decent jobs for people who cannot go to college, it is good for security because it means that the country cannot be choked off from things it needs to survive or wage war. And I think it’s good for trade that the United States be at least neutral if not a net exporter as this builds national wealth.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think it’s more of a “this was the situation before mass travel was trivial.” Its aim was people born in the USA to former slaves who had been in the USA for generations. While it mentions immigration, it mentions people naturalized as citizens, they’re not why the amendment happened. The 14th amendment was about citizenship for slaves and the children of slaves being given full citizenship.
And at the time, most immigrants were coming on boats legally. It’s wasn’t a mass of people walking across the Rio Grande in the dead of night. Mass migration of the scale seen today didn’t happen in 1870 when travel was by steamship or trains or horses. Trying to figure out what the writers of the bill mean about a situation that they absolutely never anticipated does no Justice to the law itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I’m a hard skeptic here. At least on the version where this is the Literally Hitler moment that the liberals fear.
For one thing, if you were planning on some form of dictatorship, why are you waiting on a report? Firstly, the report isn’t necessary to satisfy a law. There’s no “if homeland security and DOD don’t agree, then it’s illegal,” clause in the insurrection act, in main because neither agency existed in 1807. It doesn’t change whether or not the president can be investigated or charged, we had a Supreme Court ruling specifically stating that official acts are protected. It’s not going to convince anyone who wasn’t on board with the idea before. It’s a waste of time at best.
Second it telegraphs the punch. If you tell the opposition that you plan to use the Insurrection Act, and give them a specific date at which you might do it, planning countermeasures, calling for strikes and work stoppages and blocking buildings becomes easy. Especially if the opposition knows exactly what will be the justification will be. If this is about ICE and immigration, blocking those kinds of things is easy because everyone knows where to block the roads and protest.
I think there’s the possibility that it’s about drawing out the opposition. If you can get stupid kids on campus to be really stupid (and it’s not that hard), you can defund those schools. If you can draw out protesters and get them to do something stupid (also not that hard), you can arrest them to applause. At the same time, doing things like this wears down their will to keep going. Protest is fun for a while, but it’s not something that people with jobs can do at tge drop of a hat for months at a time. So if you if you overwhelm them, have them showing up getting arrested, and so on for months, eventually they run out of steam. Eventually you run out of time, money, and will to keep up for months.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I mean, I think the Machiavellian view of power is more or less the reality of human society. Sure, get along where you can, negotiate where you can do so without disempowerment, but the truth of this world is that you have to be willing to assert yourself and defend yourself unless you want to be fodder for those who are willing to assert dominance over you.
The Baitsao version of western civilization where we preemptively blame ourselves and give away goodies and appease bad actors while holding open the door for the invasion by people clearly seeing an opportunity to take over — it’s a dead end. They will kill off our civilization because being a doormat is held up to be a virtue in their religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
To be fair, this has always been a weakness of democratic systems. They don’t care what the correct answer to a given problem is, they care what people want. If you ask a bunch of kids what they want for dinner, you’re getting pizza, burgers, fried foods, and some sort of fries or macaroni, you won’t be getting vegetables, lean meats, fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. Of course the stuff kids won’t choose turn out to be the correct choices.
The correct answer to a budget is to make it balance and not load it down with giveaways — especially to people who are not productive in any way. The correct answer to war is “only go to war if you can’t avoid it, and if you’re defending someone else, then at the very least you should benefit from involvement.” The correct answer on immigration is strict control, selection for high value immigrants from capable countries and cultures, and only in a small number. I don’t think most of these answers would win at the ballot box. That doesn’t make it not correct, it means there’s a weakness for plebiscite in making decisions like that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
He’s mostly right, save for UK and France. Most European countries haven’t been in a war in at least a generation, and that war experience was fighting alongside the USA, who did most of the heavy lifting. The Russian military has been at full scale war for two years. It’s not looking good, I think.
I mean, given that the government of Palestine or at least the Gaza portion is Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization, I think the free speech aspect might be harder to prove. If he’s giving money, producing videos, or other things that support Hamas fairly directly, then he’s probably in violation of the law.
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