Shakes
21d ago
If America destroys all Iran's missile bases and ports it doesn't matter if they hole up in the mountains. They can do that forever, it doesn't matter. It would be nice if the Mullahs were removed from power and Iran was a fair and friendly country again. But we don't need that to happen to win.
Shakes
21d ago
In previous conflicts they were not able to reign missiles down on Tel Aviv.
They didn't have to because Hezbollah and Hamas did it for them. But they can't now, because we destroyed them.
Shakes
21d ago
Thankfully the CIA is advising Trump and not two random real estate developers and a guy with a Kafir tattoo written under his Deus Vult tattoo.
One of those real estate developers negotiated the most comprehensive peace in the Middle East in generations. "Jared Kushner is advising Donald Trump" is not actually a slam-dunk proof that America doesn't have a sense of what it's doing in the Middle East.
Shakes
21d ago
Blowing a bunch of stuff up and leaving is not victory. Neither is a situation in which the US destroys quality of life for ordinary Iranians but the same IRI regime holds power.
Why is that not a victory? Who says it's not? You? A situation in which the United States can destroy Iran's government and military at will, and Iran can't respond, is a total victory.
This is so obviously true you can only reframe that as "some ape-brained dominance display". Ok, so Trump and Hegseth are baboons who can't formulate or even imagine goals so you don't have to try to understand it, got it. What about Israel? What about Saudi Arabia? Those are two countries that wanted to start this war, are they irrational too? Did Benjamin Netanyahu and MBS have no sense of "things like 'consequences' and 'strategic objectives'"? Maybe everyone in the Middle East is incompetent? Incapable of first-order thinking? Maybe they should read The Motte?
I got downvoted the last time I said this in a different discussion so I want to elaborate: I consider this form of thinking to be a form of TDS. It reduces a complex geopolitical situation into a farce that only makes sense if Trump is the only actor in the world. It's Shakespearean! Trump speaks, anything that doesn't happen on stage while Trump gives his soliloquy to the camera doesn't happen at all. I don't need to consider anything else. Based on media rumors in the fog of war, I've determined that the war is a failure. I don't actually have to understand what American goals are because Trump is irrational, so he must not have had any. I don't even have to consider anybody else's motivations, because they don't meaningfully exist.
In reality we're on week two of an extremely complex operation in which Iran's leadership was decapitated -- they have a cardboard cutout for a Supreme Leader. The best Iran can do in response is mine the Straits of Hormuz and bomb random Gulf targets. Maybe that's a higher cost than America is willing to bear, maybe nobody thought that far ahead, but it doesn't seem likely!
Shakes
21d ago
When the first real hit lands (when he gets unpopular enough and someone - probably not one of the central players - is willing to gamble on going all in) everyone will reposition themselves.
I have been hearing this for ten years now. I want some deep introspection about why it's definitely real this time before I take it too seriously.
Shakes
21d ago
Most importantly, and this is true in pretty much every scenario, the US will have experienced a major geopolitical and military humiliation
We killed the core of Iranian leadership in an afternoon and their only viable response is to attack unrelated countries and merchant fleets. What do you mean humiliation! Maybe on twitter where geopolitics is about what makes people feel good but in the real world there is not a single major leader who is not terrified of America's military. Humiliation? America downgraded Iran from a regional power to a backwater without a meaningful military in an afternoon, all they have left are guys with guns pointed at their own citizens.
We have won so overwhelmingly that we are reduced to calling this a failure because Iran was able to get a hit in at all. Yeah, that's what war is!
In Khamenei’s son it has its preferred candidate in power, at least nominally (it may be the institution rather than the man who is in power, but it doesn’t really matter).
Please note that if the Iranian regime cannot even prove their leader is alive, either because we killed him or because we will kill him, then the Iranian government has collapsed. Collapsed! Claiming otherwise is like declaring war in the Pacific with Japan a failure because rogue holdouts continued fighting for years. We also had to drop two nukes so maybe the first one was a failure?
Who is really in charge of Iran? Nobody knows! That's not a government! Who collects taxes, who negotiates with foreign powers, who runs the judiciary? Maybe the Iranians can dig giant tunnels and live in underground cities like the mole people, although the US could actually bomb them there too.
Shakes
28d ago
Insurance on oil tankers is cheap by American standards. If Iran successfully sinks a few they will be more isolated than Nazi Germany when Hitler was in the bunker, and probably with similar results.
Shakes
28d ago
For Trump, the calculation is very simple. If lack of insurance closes the the Strait of Hormuz, the US economy will tank and he will lose the midterms.
If as you've suggested the risk is economic collapse and the cost is $250M then it doesn't seem like it's the US Government that's bad at pricing risk.
Now I am wondering what size of explosion one would need at the sea floor (perhaps 80m deep) to simply capsize an overhead tanker through the resulting bubble or shock wave. If it could be done with a ton of TNT, that would be an obvious winning move, if it takes a kiloton, that is probably out of reach for Iran.
If the Iranian position is that they will threaten global trade by blowing up merchant oil tankers then the next question isn't how much economic damage America will sustain but whether or not Iran has enough nuclear bomb shelters for 80 million people.
Shakes
28d ago
Global shipping was always implicitly and explicitly defended by American power. Of course we're morally obligated. If America can't protect global sea lanes then every other country needs a real navy again, global shipping costs skyrocket, and the entire international project disintegrates. What good is an American defense guarantee if they can't keep oil flowing? Heck, what good is a factory or bank? When MAGA said we wanted to end globalism, we meant the system where America pays for our own deindustrialization, not actually plunging the entire global supply chain back into great power politics. Of course America benefits, of course Trump is going to intervene, the ocean is an American lake.
Shakes
28d ago
Who cares? They want to kill us have spent 50 years trying to kill us and now want to acquire nuclear weapons so we can never do anything about it. It wouldn't matter if they were totally justified, they're our enemy, they hate us. (Support for the Shah 50 years ago is anyways extremely thin gruel.)
Shakes
1mo ago
This is smart people cope. The voters are too dumb to understand us, we’re too rational. I guess the smart people also too honest and pure to lie, which is how anyone with intelligence might solve that problem. And too poor to buy power anyways, even though they’re definitely smart enough to get money if only they weren’t so unlucky etc etc
Shakes
1mo ago
OpenAI just agreed to do what Anthropic would not do. Your entire analysis acts as though the only actors are Trump et al. and Anthropic. This is why I call it a form of TDS, because it’s as though all actors disappear except for whoever makes the story where Trump is disturbing make sense. You might not want hypersonic missile tech, but lots of people do! Lots of people who aren’t just Hegseth and Miller and Trump
Shakes
1mo ago
I know the tech guys and I know MAGA. The tech guys are way overestimating their intelligence or are applying success to domains where it doesn’t transfer. Otherwise you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.
Ah ok, it's woke because they were asking about how exactly it was deployed in the Maduro raid. That's what wokeness is, got it.
Yeah performative empathy in ways that only surface for America’s enemies is about as good a definition as I could imagine for woke.
Shakes
1mo ago
The AI itself would keep logs that presumably security researchers would be granted access to. The Mexican government surely could call up Anthropic and demand an examination. I don't know that this is what actually happened, but it would be sufficient as an explanation.
Shakes
1mo ago
what is certain is that this administration isn't forever.
Yes but you are mortal too
Shakes
1mo ago
Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that.
Do you have a security clearance?
unless you think that it's woke to want humans in the loop of controlling weapons and to have the civil liberty of privacy.
The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD, not the defense contractors at Anthropic.
Amdoei's supposed reaction is understandable if he, as I do, believes that giving any weapons technology to this administration without oversight might be like giving fireworks to a toddler without oversight.
This is a kind of TDS, where you collapse your personal criticisms of the administration into your practical calculus of how people should behave. Remember that there are at least three other major suppliers of AI services to the Department of Defense right now and they're not threatening to turn off military weapons.
Shakes
1mo ago
Apples to oranges. In exchange for exporting chips China offers us trade concessions, in exchange for paying Anthropic they offer us the deal that they reserve the right to cut off service whenever it crosses their AI cult morality threshold.
Shakes
1mo ago
In my experience the "tech right" and the rationalist Austin/SF crowd all thought they were smarter than MAGA and that MAGA was something they could outsmart, which means they get very angry when they don't actually get their way.
That description probably includes the culture that informs this discussion forum.
In this case, this entire subculture wants to dictate tech policy to the administration and not the other way around.
But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws. They don't get to bid for government contracts and then try to curtail what the government can do with their systems. They can try to make it about bigger moral issues, but this is very much a case of what happens when a stoppable force meets an immovable object.
Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.
I can get Claude to write a letter to Dario begging him to change his mind, what exactly is your mental model of what these AIs are doing here?
Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots
This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.
Shakes
1mo ago
Who cares if it is plausible? It's the Olympics, men like sports, powerful people need time off too. He's the director of the FBI, the last few guys were spying on Senators and Presidents, for comparison.
I can assure you that if, at any of the firms I've worked for, I used an hour-long meeting as a justification to put plane tickets and hotel rooms on the company credit card in cities where the Penguins happened to be playing away games that I attended, I would, at the very least, get a stern talking to, assuming they didn't fire me on the spot.
That's fair yeah that's a very common corporate norm yeah. But there's also an entire world of high-powered corporate big swinging-dicks where rewarding yourself with big dinners and work trips is just a perk of the work.
Shakes
1mo ago
This line of argument is about as played out now as the bean-counting every 4 years about how much the President plays golf. We created a society where the most powerful politicians and officials in America are celebrities, then we complain when they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security details when they go out for lunch. It's fine, really, it's not even top five most egregious waste of taxpayer dollars spent on US government employees this week.
Shakes
1mo ago
This one doesn't really feel like a "Culture War" to me in that: there's nothing to fight about. Based on what I can glean online the outrage is about the following points:
- How dare Kash Patel party in Italy and how dare the US Hockey Team party with him
- How dare the US Hockey Team accept an invitation to the White House and pose for pictures with President Trump
At least the first point contains some accusation of some kind of moral line being crossed. But the vast majority of the outrage is merely that Trump is involved at all, often laced with accusations that he's a rapist pedophile creep etc. But there can't really be a culture war on this point, there's nothing to do. You can't cancel the sitting president. They can't even try. And nobody can really cancel a gold-winning US Olympic Team either. So the vast majority of discussion of this issue seems to me to be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Nothing else is going on. An American team won Gold at the Olympics, then did not act as if they had TDS, and now a lot who do have TDS are mad. What's there to argue about?
Shakes
1mo ago
I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot.
This is not rational. Your idea of what true MAGA would believe if they believed Trump is not how people actually observably act. The fact that people don't invest life savings in Ukrainian companies (???) is actually good evidence MAGA is serious, because MAGA is grounded in some kind of reality. What you are describing is how people would act in a cult, which, despite all sorts of ideas current online, is not actually how MAGA behaves.
Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.
This is cope, plain and simple. MAGA is real and believes the things it says it believes. Trump is real and believes the things he says he believes. It's you who's hallucinating by conflating factual disputes (they stopped counting votes in several swing states simultaneously) with obvious poetic license (Oh, Denmark didn't actually send a dogsled?).
Shakes
1mo ago
I will grant you that the attack ad he paid for after then Central Park Five case was not something which obviously benefited him.
The Central Park Five were guilty.
But my impression is that most of the times he sticks his neck out for an unpopular belief, it is a belief which is directly about himself.
His political career started by mainstreaming illegal immigration and deportations into a political arena that did not want to talk about it, even though it immediately resulted in him losing contracts and business opportunities. He stuck by Corey Lewandowski when he was accused of assaulting a reporter for lightly brushing past her. Trump maintained a strong position on tariffs for decades against much ferocious opposition and no obvious benefit for his own interests. He was happy to be booed by a crowd of Republicans for criticizing Bush for lying about the Iraq War. He got gay marriage out of the Republican platform. He built a wall. They dragged his name through the mud with all manner of fake accusations, women he assaulted who couldn't even remember when it happened, they tried putting him in jail. Most famously, he dodged a bullet to the head and then stood up before a crowd of his supporters and pumped his fist and told them to keep fighting.
I could go on, really, but this is all tedious repetition of the obvious truth. Trump does not enter politics, does not run for president, does not become president, without big, massive, huge personal sacrifice. He could have sat on a beach in Miami with his billions and his tower in New York after a very accomplished life, and nothing would have happened, and he would be fine. You don't have to like what he did but you can't seriously deny that he sacrificed a lot, that for one small alteration in fate here or there he would have lost everything. That it has worked out so far and made him more successful is not actually evidence that he did this out of his own self-interest. If it was that easy you would see a lot more imitators trying to do what he did.
And most of his successes in politics are based on promises he made long ago, because he has actually been extremely consistent in attempting the things he said all along he wanted to do.
I will also grant you that it is hard to know what he genuinely believes because his home ground is Simulacrum level four, where words have no relationship to anything in physical reality.
I just do not think this is a serious belief you can actually credibly defend. Maybe it sounds nice as some kind of slapdash pubtalk barcrawl locker room talk. But do you really, honestly, earnestly, believe that Trump is best modeled as a kind of void whose words bear no relation to anything whatsoever? Not just that he lies, or even that he lies more than other politicians. But that for Trump "words have no relationship to anything in physical reality"? What does that do to your view of the world?
Trump is very much not part of the Christian Right (which opposes abortion). He certainly does not believe that sex should be between husband and wife only (which is at the end of the day what the Christian Right is all about).
I'm not sure why you invoke the Christian Right here actually, except as maybe a comparison or metaphor, but I have to point out that the Christian Right is peaked. Trump killed it. They are not the animating force in Republican politics anymore, as much as they'd like to be.
Nor does he seem to really care about gun rights. His administration was quick to blame Pretti for bringing a gun to a protest. Are you telling me that in a world where he could win the mid-terms by passing gun bans, he would decide to lose instead out of a principled belief in 2A?
Yeah you can think it's stupid to bring a gun to obstruct police officers and also believe in the 2nd Amendment. There's no part of the 2nd Amendment that logically entails ignoring cause and effect. Support for the 2nd Amendment doesn't require that every time a guy has a gun I declare he's justified and in the right. Notably, if Trump wanted to take the opposite position, and didn't believe in the 2nd Amendment at all, he could have run as a Democrat. Like he was in the 90s.
Shakes
1mo ago
I’ve always though “hard men make strong times” Ibn Khaldun Fremen thesis G. Michael Hopf was a bit of a truism. If you plotted a graph with time on one axis and “hard times / good times” on the other, it would be fairly obvious. If the line is continuous, if you can only ever go toward “good times” or “bad times,” then the thesis says nothing. If the line goes up, you’re in good times, and when the line goes down, poof, presto, it created bad times just like we predicted. All it really means is that nothing lasts forever.
We did. Then we stationed American soldiers in Afghanistan, gave them rules of engagement that prevented them from killing anybody, and spent billions of dollars on liberal NGO projects that did things like feminist opera in Kabul. We're not doing that anymore.
So far all that's been produced is a cardboard cutout.
The Gulf states asked us to do this.
Oh.
More options
Context Copy link