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.
Shakes
1mo ago
This is like if I said there are lots of theories of death, and you said, well, death is complicated and caused by lots of things, so there can’t be a theory. But there are lots of such theories.
Shakes
1mo ago
I gotta add though thanks for starting an argument about Brett Devereaux because I feel like I've been holding in some opinions about him for years without the proper forum for venting about it
Shakes
1mo ago
Yeah Devereaux's analysis on why the books are logistically realistic in a way the movies are not is one of his best analyses. It might redeem the rest of his blogging career.
Shakes
1mo ago
The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield.
If you want to judge the Spartans as "they suck" because you don't agree with them, you're not really engaging with the spirit of history. Your assessment of the Spartans doesn't tell us anything about Sparta, it tells us about your particular modern ideas. You might as well as not be doing history, you're not doing history, your assessment of the Spartans was pre-determined from your moral priors. What about this strikes you as worth doing? You already know what you think.
just how much suckitude
If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong.
a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history
to build badassitude
A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British
Look I don't want to be mean but this style of writing codes to me as so decidedly unserious that I'm not actually sure what you think you're doing. It conjures up to me a whole stereotype of ironic millennials can't say what they mean because the style is more important than the substance. This attitude often exists in a discourse where arguments are not even considered as arguments but as exercises in taste, you're not just wrong if you don't like Obama or Vietnamese food or Black Lives Matter, you're a bad person. Maybe that's just me projecting something onto you of which you are totally unrelated. But I feel the need to explain this because, again, it's hard for me to otherwise model the mental universe of someone professing to discuss history seriously while using concepts like "suckitude" and "badassitude".
Shakes
1mo ago
The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.
If you have an argument about why empires rise and fall you believe is indisputable, you should write it. You would solve one of the most hotly-contested controversies in all historical scholarship. Spengler Tainter Gibbons Ibn Khaldun Toynbee Diamond Montesquieu Burckhardt Mommsen Braudel Wallerstein Marx etc etc
"There is no interesting Motte"? This sounds so absurd to me I have to assume you're describing twitter reply guys and not the broader scholastic field of studying imperial collapse, where there are absolutely a million mottes. Which is the exact problem with Devereaux: he turns all his historical training on random internet anons to fight a culture war, probably because his historical chops are not strong enough to actually make a dent in the field of study.
Shakes
1mo ago
Devereaux runs a moderately successful old-style blog where he wrote a somewhat famous series of essays outlining his position on Sparta. I read them several times and found them very exhaustively researched. In a way that makes it difficult to rebut his position without going to a lot of work. But, ultimately, I thought that his theory of Sparta started with a base incredulity. He can't believe that there was ever anything about Sparta that anyone ever found admirable. So all his research is just exhaustive fact-checking to prove that whatever you the reader or other ancient Greeks liked about Sparta, well, those reasons are pants-on-fire false. A lot of historians play this game where they "prove" their moral judgments because their historical judgments are so exhaustive. (This is also how a lot of people treat Robert Caro.)
Shakes
1mo ago
At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president.
If you really believe this there's not much productive discussion we can have because we will keep running into endless disagreements over basic facts about Trump. Is it even possible to prove that Trump does have consistent beliefs and has often suffered consequences for them? Not if we assert, a priori, that Trump just had those positions because they were convenient, so there must be some explanation of how those consequences were convenient. Now we can predict anything Trump ever does with a theory that can never be wrong.
the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made
There are still DHS forces in Minneapolis.
Shakes
1mo ago
Bad Bunny had a billboard up at the top of the stadium proclaiming "THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE". Therefore, Bad Bunny's halftime show was about a message of love and if you didn't like it it's because you're full of hate.
(I don't even remember seeing this billboard at all during the show itself, it primarily showed up online during social media discussion afterwards.)
Shakes
2mo ago
Seems like this judge might have just invented a multi-billion dollar market in legal LLMs run by your lawyer and covered under attorney-client privilege. Have your lawyer spin up an LLM in a box that’s specifically between you and your lawyer. At least, if my lawyer sends me an email that’s covered so there must be some workaround equivalent.
Shakes
2mo ago
Or, we can accept this schizophrenic definition of evidence, where any accusation or implication made by anybody anywhere is evidence, and maybe we can agree on the following:
- There is evidence that Donald Trump raped and murdered a little girl
- There is evidence that Ted Lieu raped and murdered a little girl
- There is a LOT of evidence that the 2020 election was stolen
- There is evidence that the moon landing was faked by Stanley Kubrick
- There is evidence that the Corona plandemic slash scamdemic was a Chinese plot by Anthony Fauci to poison us with mRNA technologies
- There is evidence that a satanic pedophile cabal is running the Democratic Party and wants to install Hillary Clinton as president
Heck, I’ve even heard accounts in my lifetime that the aliens want to conquer earth for our stable supply of quartz, and you can tell which politicians are controlled by the demons by the shapes of their ears. It’s all in the book of OASPIE
There’s evidence for everything in the world! That’s what “evidence” means
Shakes
2mo ago
Nobody really thinks an anonymous random or motivated accusation constitutes evidence. There is no evidence Trump raped and murdered a little girl. I think you’re committed to defending this ridiculous definition of evidence because the alternative is admitting that Bondi did not commit some kind of perjury, and you were wrong.
Shakes
2mo ago
I was promised a pedophile sex cult new world, not elite insider trading. I don’t know I guess I don’t know much about this specifically, maybe you should elaborate. Because this sounds like the kind of scandal that’s happening everywhere all the time, except this involves Jeffrey Epstein, who we know is the new Hitler, which means it must be really bad.
I think it’s bad Bill Gates cheated on his wife then gave her an STD risk and wanted to sneak her antibiotics, but I’m not sure what public good is advanced by these files being exposed.
Shakes
2mo ago
They lied to get us into the Iraq War. This exact attitude is why we got Trump. So in a way you deserve it.
Shakes
2mo ago
Look it’s one thing if Congress becomes a dysfunctional clown show that does nothing but produce clippets for TikTok but let’s not here dignify that by workshopping all the ways those clowns could have better pandered their quips for our sensibilities
Shakes
2mo ago
“u/magicalkittycat participated in a child sacrifice cannibal ritual on Mount Clinton. What, that’s a solid accusation, that makes it evidence, you have to refute this now, there’s evidence!”
We all understand what “no evidence” actually means. It assumes implicitly that some claims are so low-effort that they don’t merit rebutting. When you call random anonymous tip line accusations about child rape “evidence” you’re implicitly asserting that they’re credible. Otherwise, what kind of gotcha language game is this?
The falsehood happens when Ted Lieu treats total bullshit as worth anyone’s time. Then, when Bondi dismisses this out of hand, he gets to act offended. That’s what this all is, it’s an obvious political stunt. It’s manipulative and it’s not in good faith. Unless you want to argue that “Donald Trump raped and killed a child” is credible, then it’s obvious that the distinction between “no evidence” and “no credible evidence” collapses. Or what, is Pam Bondi getting angry at obvious bullshit supposed to be a crime now because Ted technically rigged the question? This isn’t subtle and everyone knows exactly what’s meant here.
Shakes
2mo ago
Why the head of the FBI chose to treat that hearing as a defensive MAGA brawl, drawing more attention to it, than just matter-of-factly answering the questions as if there are serious people working on serious matters, is something I will never understand. Ted Lieu's presentation of uncorroborated tip line craziness
Doesn't this answer itself? Ted Lieu repeated accusations that Trump raped a child and killed it, this isn't a serious matter, these aren't serious people. Maybe Placid Bondi would have been a better media strategy. But given that senior Democrats are now arguing we have a pedophile president coverup, I'm not convinced any other Bondi media strategy would have received less criticism. Bondi could have been totally calm and relaxed and people would be saying, "The head of the FBI doesn't care about crimes, she's drawing more attention to the coverup!"
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.
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