TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
LLMs should be compared with customer service agents... if an agent was unhelpful would you stay on the line or just hang up and call a new one? I hang up until I get someone helpful... LLM sessions should be used similarly.
Does this really work for human customer service agents? I would have presumed that they're following a pre-planned script for most issues.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.
I'm not sure what you're confused about here. I'm saying isolationists hypocritically turn into interventionists after Trump intervenes. And then the right-wing criticism Trump has faced has been very muted, even from ostensible isolationists. Gabbard was highly isolationist before Trump, but now publicly praises interventions. Tucker is also isolationist, but instead of criticizing Trump he pulls his punches and nonsensically blames gay marriage instead, since he knows his audience will hate him if he comes out against Trump too much.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
The problem with this view is that foreign policy actions are highly contingent. The architects of the Iraq invasion in 2003 genuinely thought it would be a 6 month operation tops, that they would just go in and out, and it would be mostly over in a few news cycles. Then things started going a little bit badly afterwards so 6 months turned into 12 months, then one thing led to another and they ended up with a quagmire.
I'd say Trump deserves some credit for not going completely crazy out of the gate, but he's certainly rolling the dice. It's not difficult to see something bad happening in Venezuela that brings bad headlines, Trump recoiling at said headlines when they show up on Fox and Friends, and hawks coming to him to say "Sir, things are bad but if we just do a little bit more everything will be better. Pinky promise".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
If I got a warning for what was basically "you can't criticize the MAGA circlejerk", then yes I would complain especially if I could find inverse examples that are functionally equivalent, but just pointing in the other direction. And that wouldn't be hard. "Leftists seem to think" posts are not uncommon on this forum.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
I think Trump could have been "genuine" when it came to his original foreign policy views, but that doesn't mean much since he's a waffle who frequently changes based on whoever was the last person to have spoken with him, or from whatever news headlines he watches on Fox. He got a lot of good right-wing press from this recent Venezuela adventure, which seems to have really whetted his appetite for more military actions
It will be interesting to see if we get a right wing occupy movement
Not gonna happen. MAGA is fully in the tank for the personality cult around Trump and I don't see that changing in the immediate future, and in 1-2 years Trump will be a lame duck anyways so it won't really matter.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
Who exactly do you believe has been humiliated here?
Gabbard, for being so blatantly hypocritical. Also, MAGA partisans to some degree, although flip-flopping for them is so common whenever Trump does something they previously said they wouldn't support that it's not really news any more.
"isolationism" in the eyes of Trump's supporters
I would say most of them don't have consistent definitions. Some like Michael Tracey are consistent, but most are just vibing and will switch their positions to say they love whatever Trump does after the fact.
have been more or less disastrous than the Biden Administration
Biden was the only President that I would say had a genuinely good foreign policy. Getting us out of that stupid Afghan war is something every President since Bush should have done, including Trump, but none of them did it. His actions on Ukraine and uniting NATO were also exemplary, although I have quibbles with the scale of aid to Ukraine. He was right on all the major issues.
His immigration policy on the other hand... yeesh!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20d ago
My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource
This is how immigrants have always viewed the USA, including Ellis Islanders that came in the 1800s. Do you think the Irish fleeing the potato famine primarily came to the US because they wanted its culture? Obviously not, which is why they cloistered up in corrupt groups like Tammany Hall.
The thing that made the USA unique was that it was pretty good at assimilating these people over 3ish generations. It made them care about America's civic institutions, and got people to slowly realize that the main reason why the US had so much $$$ was because of its culture, and so people should care about that culture.
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture"
I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this. The only time I've heard it was 4chan shitposting on /pol/ as clear bait.
This year has delivered a nonstop string of humiliations for MAGA isolationists as Trump has increasingly turned towards military measures. A few days ago Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???). Tulsi Gabbard has arguably had it even worse, as her 2019 opening speech for her presidential campaign criticized Trump's flirting with regime change in Venzeula and Iran, yet she happily serves in the Trump administration and even supports Trump's policies. A report by Bloomberg today states that she was actually excluded from meetings discussing the Venezuela op, with her Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position jokingly being recast as "do not invite". Presumably the rest of Trump's team thought she might leak the details, or even commit outright treason by informing the Venezuelans beforehand.
It's hard to have principles when the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with an extremely narrow window of what's deemed acceptable to criticize Trump for. Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
Seems like almost a pure accident to me. The driver panics when an aggressive man yanks on her car's door handle, and tries to get away ASAP. Officer with an itchy trigger finger interprets the car accelerating at him and decides to shoot first and ask questions later.
Of course, if you go looking for fault then you can definitely dig some up. She shouldn't have been there in the first place. She should have listened to the directions of the officers. She shouldn't have panicked. The Iceman shouldn't have been in front of the car. He should have focused on getting out of the way instead of pulling out a gun. Shooting wouldn't have made a difference since he was so close. He wasn't in the vehicle's path when he shot -- it actually sort of looks like he leaned in to get a better angle to shoot.
Partisans will selectively parse evidence to support their side and vilify their outgroup. The fact it's ambiguous makes it a pretty good scissor event, though I doubt it will reach the heights of BLM since that was a 3-standard deviation phenomenon.
It feels like you're just carrying water for the Trump admin's foolishness. "The outgroup is going to behave bad, so we need to behave just as bad!"
Or the admin could, you know, just not do inflammatory things when stuff like this happens? Do the politician-speak of "this was a terrible tragedy", imply it was an "accident" from split-second judgement, then leave the sectarian shitposting to people like Catturd who were going to do it anyways. Biden mostly did this with a few exceptions that I can think of.
Then again, the even smarter thing would be for them to call off this whole punitive ICE expedition. Minnesota has a problem with Somali fraud, and the US as a whole has a problem with illegal immigrants, but this expedition is not an effective way to address either. It exists mostly to goose up R's on social media, and because Trump personally dislikes people like Walz and Ilhan Omar. In terms of actual effects, its end effect will be to incinerate the anti-immigration political capital built up from Biden's open borders years with remarkable efficiency.
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