curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This is a clever way for a politician to dodge a question, not 'epistemic virtue', imo. Politicians of all sides say things that sound reasonable sometimes, that itself doesn't make you virtuous. Like almost all politicians, he regularly lies about basic facts if they advantage his team, eg saying he could put mayors of cities in jail for sanctuary city policies. I wouldn't say he has less epistemic virtue than other politicians either - they all do this because if you don't you lose elections - but this is a stretch.
You really don't need to overthink it. Annexing territory is based. It's the kind of thing a STRONG MAN character would do on TV. It's swinging your dick around. It makes the right people excited and the right people angry. And it's not so implausible that, like annexing Canada, it just reads as a joke whenever you say it. Donald Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and the commander in chief of the military, he's the one making the decision to pursue this, and this just is how he thinks (alternate hypotheses fail to explain his behavior, eg the events around Liberation Day). He's the first Simulacra Level 4 President.
And it's not like there's not strategic logic to the US acquiring Greenland. It should've already happened (gwern link). All else equal, more land = more power. The US's past land purchases seem like good ideas in retrospect. You would prefer to directly control land rather than just lease military bases. I would prefer the US to control greenland (and canada) than not. Even if only to make travel simpler. This is part of why the idea's plausible enough for Trump to push this hard for it, it's not by itself stupid (though the way he's been pursuing it is) but it's not, I think, really why he wants it.
Even from a perspective that doesn't care about progressive moral values or democracy, the current government of Iran leaves much to be desired. Take the water crisis, caused by decades of mismanagement. How can a country with nuclear weapons struggle with water? How does a major oil producer have rolling blackouts? Or 40% annual inflation? That's really quite bad! These are bigger drivers of the protests than democracy! Protests of this sort are a natural check on government mismanagement, even when they don't overthrow the regime (which they usually don't), because they put pressure on the regime to keep the cost of goods low in a way somewhat similar to fair elections.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
I've heard several anecdotal reports of people who took it and say it didn't really work. I don't think there's much risk of permanent damage though.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Sure but you can see how we should have higher standards for supreme court justices than "a bit above average for judges"?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity
... why? I don't read Supreme Court opinions much so I don't have an opinion on it myself, but this is the kind of thing that could be true, and would have significant political implications if so. Sotomayor being dumb isn't just a personal insult, it's a fact about a person that would make their rulings worse. And that the impact of her being maybe dumb is blunted by the rest of the court being less doesn't make it not worth discussing - if true, a trend of appointing more people like that could be really bad for the country! And it doesn't have to be an outgroup thing, you could easily imagine Trump getting mad about fedsoc judges 'cucking' and appointing some low IQ people himself.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
In practice, if I just want to get something of simple-moderate complexity done, the best UI library is react. It works, the functional style is nice, there are whatever libraries you need. Web browser APIs have problems, but I'd much rather interact with them than deal with native stuff. UI latency is fine if you don't do anything complicated, a lot of optimization work's gone into the browser, and you get cross platform + mobile easily. Javascript kinda sucks but it's fine. And you probably don't need electron, just make a website.
As I use codex/claude code to implement high-level features and do complicated changes with just a few lines of natural language, not really! I mostly just think the AI 2027 people are wrong to update that much upwards.
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