RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Despite every war being started by the Arabs
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming".
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
If Iran's nuclearization is inevitable
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
While the conflict is unsightly, the economic policy of 'lets continuously cut taxes and raise spending' is Zimbabwe-tier. America cannot afford to treat the rest of the world like retarded clowns forever, no matter how stupid and foolish other countries are. They're not going to keep buying these little bits of paper at a high price. Bond rates have been and will continue to rise.
A trillion dollars borrowed every 180 days? Inflation will inevitably spike and then interest rates will need to be raised, with serious consequences for refinancing. US is already at 124% debt to GDP, there's not much more room to borrow.
There are lots of people on the MAGA-right who don't seem to care about this at all, just the political impossibility of cutting spending. Being bankrupt isn't great politically either. Inflationary spirals aren't great either. Schizo tariff wars with the rest of the world... aren't great either. Trump and some of his key advisors have basically no concept of what it means to run the economy, they are not economically literate. It's like Soviet politburo members in the 1980s who had no idea how the Soviet economy actually ran, the complex dual-currency system that existed to prevent inflation. They had no concept of inflation. The Biden administration was little better, they did much the same thing. But one fundamentally can't expect loyalty from others if one flails around breaking things constantly in a position of power.
Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.
The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.
Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.
Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!
There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.
Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.
Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.
China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!
A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.
More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.
They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I heard that if you ask Deepseek R1 about the Ukraine war in English, it'll give you the US story. If you ask in Russian, it puts on it's Z-armband and give the Russian story. But then R1 is not AGI.
Also, consider historiography. There is no way to turn an enormous depth of known facts into a narrative without simplifying or taking some kind of perspective. You can't give 'what actually happened' without boring your audience senseless, you need to identify the salient facts. There can be more or less true narratives of course but a universal narrative is very, very hard to swallow.
Because they're a tiny, weak country pretending to be a major power. 10 million people, 7 million of them Jews, cannot sustain significant long-term military capacity against even low-medium strength foes if they lose the support of the US. Israel's Gaza campaign is dependent upon US munitions and US support. They aren't even able to raze Gaza without US munitions 'forward-based' in Israel, de facto there for them to use.
US sanctions? They're done. Israel's high-tech economy goes straight to zero and the country disintegrates. How do you sanction-proof with such a small country? F-35s probably wouldn't last 6 months without the gigantic global supply chain of parts.
Because that has never worked, not even once, in the history of humanity?
Wars simply cannot be won by assassinations. This has been tried again and again. It doesn't work. It didn't work on Al-Qaeda. US blows up their leaders all the time (Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022, who nobody has heard of) and they're still around, doing their thing, building camps in Afghanistan... It didn't work on ISIS. US blew up Al Baghdadi to no effect. What defeated ISIS was losing their territory and army, even then they're still lurking underground.
Israel tried this on Hamas. They blow up Hamas leaders all the time. It has no effect, Hamas is still fighting.
To win a war, there are no sneaky tricks, you have to actually achieve your military goals on the battlefield, in service of a broad political goal. Assassination is a tactic to achieve some kind of short-term, minor advantage - like sniper fire. It's not a strategy and cannot substitute for victory. Until recent counter-insurgency wars nobody was even silly enough to try this and for good reason.
If Iran blew up Donald Trump and Hegseth plus some generals what effect would this have on America? Would the country collapse? Would there even be any significant impairment to capabilities? No, it wouldn't do anything beyond sparking lots of discourse and cause some stock market shenanigans.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Well if you assume that all Musk's projects will fail, then yes I would agree that he's a dead man warning.
Sometimes Musk succeeds and other times he fails. His attempt to make his own Dojo AI chip failed. But he's doing pretty well on AI with Nvidia chips, Grok 3 is better than anything Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon has come up with.
Maybe Starship fails, maybe it succeeds. If there was no Starship wouldn't you say something like 'oh the competition is catching up, how is he going to stay ahead, there's no product on the horizon'? Developing new products isn't easy, rockets have been known to fail. Who even is the competition? The entire Chinese state and private sector? Bezos who just got into orbit in 2025? ULA? ESA? SpaceX makes them all look puny.
What are the odds that all Musk's upcoming products fail? Robotaxis and Optimus will fail? Well then Tesla would be in a bad place. But how do you know that?
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things? I'm pretty sure you don't fail your way into hundreds of billions of dollars. The media has a skewed perspective on Musk. Whenever Tesla stock goes down we get a morality tale of 'evil never prospers' where you can just sense their glee, yet when Tesla stock goes up (up by 50% since March) there's a mysterious silence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
A good chunk of an executive's job is having meetings with important people, this is standard stuff for executives. They're off to Davos, London, Brussels all the time flying the flag, trying to influence people, feeling self-important, hobnobbing.
Also, AI is very important. It is genuinely significant that I could copy in your post to Claude or ChatGPT and get a considered albeit milquetoast response with more em-dashes than you can shake a stick at. It says the same thing that pigeonburger is saying, that there's moral legitimacy that the Catholic Church can provide, that they might want to shape Pope Leo's response (like his 19th century namesake who tried to balance between capitalism and worker-protectionism). It also agrees there's a tension between transhumanist tech elites and traditional moral conceptions of humanity, that there's a large-scale, civilization-scale change that tech is aiming for.
You best start believing in transhumanist techno-religion, you're living in a world with thinking, conscious (by which I mean 'awake' in the sense that Siri is not) machine-spirits. This is a momentous change. For the entirety of history we have been the only entities on this planet with advanced mental faculties. Now we are not. It's really not just about the money, it's about everything else.
What aspect of life will not be touched by AI? People are going insane right now with sycophantic delusions proffered by AI. The redditors of /r/changemyview got their brains rearranged by Claude. People are loving and ERPing with their cyberwaifus and husbandoes, spending enormous amounts of time on character.ai. Everywhere I see the signs of AI writing, in media, in news, in diction and essays.
People are dying on the battlefield to autonomous drones and AI targeting for conventional weapons. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into this technology and for good reason, it's tremendously powerful and dangerous.
Does anyone actually look up to middle managers in HR departments, girlboss or otherwise? How is that prestigious? Lots of people look down on HR as useless do-nothing wreckers, yourself included. HR are villains in popular culture: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADWb4gM7cDM
Or McKinsey? Consultants are also reviled and blamed for so many problems. Quite right too IMO.
Academia is prestigious (letters before and after your name!), being a lawyer is prestigious, working in finance, working in some human-rights NGO is prestigious/virtuous, being a doctor is prestigious. All of these have some tangible pull factor, ranging from power, wealth, high academic requirements or virtue. There might be hostility but they're not despised like HR is.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-l0HFgfDWec&t=13
I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes
HR only has a lack of negatives (you don't have to deal with the general public grubbily asking for fries, you work sitting down all day).
I think the issue is that there's a default track in that you're supposed to go to university (you are smart aren't you?) and then people feel like they need to use their uni degree, so they go into HR or some similar low-value public service job. It's a smooth progression.
Nobody ever dreamed of working at McKinsey, they just end up there after going to uni and studying 'business'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
They're projecting force into Tel Aviv right now. You can see videos of missiles coming down and discourse about who gets let into the bomb shelters.
This is just like the campaign with the Houthis. The US drops bombs, blows things up. Who can say if they're hitting real targets or dummy targets or whatever. Yet the Houthis retain the ability to strike shipping, it's a stalemate. The US doesn't achieve the goal of 'stopping attacks on shipping' and the Houthis don't achieve the goal of 'stopping the Israeli campaign in Gaza'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Particularly bizarre given that Jews don't believe that Jesus was the messiah. Why would any Christian be so passionately devoted to people who dispute one of their most fundamental beliefs?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I agree, one can also see elements of the pre-WW1 crisis slide ('22 war in Ukraine, '23 Israel war, '25 Iran-Israel conflict), a gradually heightening sense of hysteria about foreign threats and this looming drama of '27 being the year when it all kicks off: AI and China-Taiwan.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
People moved from productive roles to non-productive roles in response. HR wrecking your ability to hire. Endless meetings where nothing happens. Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months because the people on the other side are just lazy and everyone is too polite and unbothered to insist on a reasonable schedule (why be rude and damage relationships when there's all this money floating around).
Construction is an especially bad case, I consider it to have been deliberately sabotaged by vested interests, people whose entire job is to prevent development and construction with inane zoning or regulations. It really isn't that hard. Singapore has seen construction productivity rising. China can build large apartments in weeks, there are videos of it happening. Potholes that would linger for aeons in America disappear quickly in Japan.
Productivity in terms of 'wealth created per person actually working' has risen rapidly.
AI can raise productivity hugely, providing that implementation isn't sabotaged by the usual suspects. But it will reduce the number of producers and create vast opposing lobbies of angry & unemployed + wreckers and saboteurs. Thus I suspect we will see both productivity stagnation and productivity explosion, just like in the construction industry. Software companies may become massively more productive, only to hire many more charismatic, respected, dignified, useless management staff and thus keep their productivity where it was. Or they might just become massively more productive and skip the bloat. Countries can choose whether to do things efficiently and cheaply or whether they'll pay more and wait longer for inferior products. Of course, making the wrong choice will eventually lead to having sovereignty and wealth stripped away.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Do you mean special forces or regular ground troops?
Because it takes ages and ages for the latter to even arrive. Back in 1990-1991 it took about 6 months for the US and Coalition ground forces to get ready to go and in many respects America had a much freer hand back then, along with more naval transport capacity. Airmobile assets won't cut it for a ground campaign in such a large country, you'd need the bulk of the US army.
Whereas I could believe that there are already special forces on the ground, just like in Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!
Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America, it's not like they'll allow Chinese competition in America. They have one of the world's biggest markets locked down. Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
'the far right nazis'
No such person, there are variations. There's lots of anger about muslim rape gangs and demographic replacement.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Assassinating Bin Laden and other leaders is not why Al-Qaeda isn't a major threat to the US right now, that has more to do with improved security and intelligence operations preventing major attacks and ISIS stealing their thunder in the Islamist world. Right now they're focused on building up and developing with their return to Afghanistan.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
I'm still skeptical of 'Musk cooked his brain with drugs' as a narrative. Have any of these commentators actually met the guy? Or are they familiar with him through media only? If we believed the media on Putin, he was supposed to have died of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and maybe another dozen things by now. But this isn't so. Just because journalists don't like him, he isn't necessarily in ill health.
Plus you're forgetting the brain implants that let a guy play games while completely disabled, Neuralink is state-of-the-art albeit not a revolutionary breakthrough. What about the satellite network that kept Ukraine in the fight? What about nuking Kamala's election chances?
Roughly 1 major development per year is still pretty impressive! At the risk of sounding like a redditor 10 years ago, how is he not the modern Tony Stark? Ridiculously wealthy, unrealistically multi-domain, extremely controversial womanizer with outrageously grandiose dreams, extremely petty and lacking in wisdom, highly idealistic, plus significant but not obviously debilitating drug issues.
What kind of unrealistic standard requires one not to ever fail, or not fail several times in succession? Facebook's AI and VR programs have been failures yet they're successful. Google's past is littered with failures, they're infamous for making and abandoning products. But they're still successful. If the media was constantly constructing a 'Google is really fucked this time' narrative, then lots of people would believe it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
If they wanted to do this, why muck about for the last 30-40 years without getting nukes? It really doesn't take that long. They've got plenty of engineering expertise and oil money to spend on it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out
And is this actually true, or is it made up or heavily exaggerated? Fox News is not known for its even-handedness and scrupulous journalistic integrity regarding Israel and Iran.
The start of a major conflict is a breeding ground for misinformation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
Fiscal responsibility (in its ultimate form) comes above democracy.
If the US goes bankrupt, nobody is coming in with a bailout. Nobody can, America is too big.
If the situation is 'I can't trust that the other guy won't just rob the coffers once I've refilled them' then eliminate the other guy so he can't compete for power. You can't endlessly borrow money from the rest of the world to buy goods from the rest of the world at a rapid pace. It has to correct, regardless of whether you're a democracy or an autocracy or a theocracy. It's politically impossible to cut spending or raise taxes? Well it will become possible, it will become mandatory. Either you grow your way out of debt, or you have to rebalance spending and taxes.
Look at Bolivia: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/bolivia-political-chaos/
Currency down the toilet, overt threats of a military coup, vicious politicization of the judiciary, power struggle, lots of debt and no way to pay it. They can't just ignore the debt and economic crisis because they don't like it.
There are many things the left and right agree on in America, combatting China for one. Can't do that or anything else if you have no money! The consequences of a serious economic crisis like what's happening in Bolivia but in the US are unprecedented, it would probably be at least as bad as the Great Depression for living standards and might be sufficient to finish off democracy entirely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Helping oneself would logically include knowing one's enemies.
There is stupidity along with evil. Many, many unnecessary mistakes even from an evil-maxxing perspective. It is not an unreasonable expectation for backroom dealmakers in 2020 to foresee that Biden would become a problem and that Kamala would not necessarily be an ideal candidate.
Well Chirac said that's what happened and he was on the phone with Bush.
I think it's strange and concerning that leaders of a nuclear superpower are using this apocalyptic, religious language regarding high-profile foreign policy, plus general lack of thought. There are both deniable (Chirac and Trump stuff) and undeniable instances of this weirdness. Diplomats do not usually send back this kind of message to a head of state, Huckabee is a wildly inappropriate choice for ambassador but that's to be expected at this point.
I don't like Ted Cruz's support of Israel but it seems to be more than simply 'I've been paid off' or 'I know this is good for my political career', it's 'I am a true believer'. The latter has fewer limits on their enthusiasm and is more dangerous because of it.
Leaders should be reasoning in a sober, secular way, weighing up the pros and cons. When a CEO says 'God is guiding my hands' then it's a bit sus. Why should Ted or Bush or anyone bother weighing up the pros and cons if God is on his side and will sort it out anyway?
Interesting, never knew that.
He seems to be rather like the Mule in terms of charisma, which is to be expected if such a simple clip of him can get 16 million views on youtube, forever memorable:
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