quiet_NaN
6hr ago
The other bit of context is that Iran has denied being in negotiations with the US wrt the tweet from the 23.
This does not mean that there were no negotiations (they lie just as much as Trump does), but seems to rule out negotiations which were going great.
Empirically, polities are willing to publicly state that they are in negotiations with an adversary long before they reach terms. Ukraine and Russia had negotiations. Israel and Hamas had negotiations.
If you can't even admit that you are negotiating, the chances that you are able to sell your country on a peace deal are basically nil.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
I see acceptable aesthetics as a necessary but not sufficient criterion.
Suppose you are interviewing for a job, and I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them. For most positions, this would instantly disqualify me, and rightly so.
If instead I come in dressed acceptably that does not mean I am actually qualified to do the job, and it would be very foolish to simply hire the best-dressed person (unless you are hiring a fashion designer, perhaps).
Trump tweets like a deranged lunatic. Of course someone who instead wrote masterful sonnets could have policies which were just as bad, but this does not mean that we should just ignore that fact.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
Chat Control 2.0 failed: "Chat Control" was a controversial bill that allowed scanning private data of EU citizens to catch child predators and CSAM distributors. Chat Control 2.0 would've been more invasive than the existing one (requiring client-side scanning), but was rejected while the old one expired.
Good riddance.
My heuristic is that any time the state whines about CSAM, or generally one of the horsemen of the infocalypse, treat it as a power grab by the police wanting more rights to snoop on citizens. Once you let them snoop, they will find other areas of concern which are also very terrible and before you know it, you have been frog-boiled into letting them search your phones for copyright violations.
The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.
The second, IMHO much smaller problem is people making CSAM available for members of the public. It is obviously bad for the victims, and arguably it may create customers willing to pay or more speculatively drives consumers to sexual abuse. But even here you do not need to scan people's private messages. After all, definitionally any such group has an inlet, which means that you can just have cops infiltrate it. And once you are in their chat groups, you can trivially track down the people behind it through their phone numbers. Well, at least for mainstream chat apps which the chat control would target, but anyone tech savvy enough to use tor will also be tech savvy enough to thwart client side scanning.
What remains would be closed groups, who personally know and trust each other, and use encrypted chat apps to exchange CSAM. This seems a pretty minor problem, to be honest. If you institute client side scanning, they can just switch to trading boxes full of VHS tapes. Any car on the Autobahn could have such a box in it! Does this mean we should install xray scanners to search through all the cars?
Obviously not. There are always tradeoffs between effectively enforcing laws and the costs of doing so, both monetarily and to civil liberty. CSAM as a whole, and the cases which could only be detected with client side scanning in particular does not seem like a big deal, e.g. compared to sexual abuse of children more generally. I mean, it is good that it is illegal and we will punish you if we catch you, but the average kid getting sexually abused is not getting abused because their guardian wants to make a quick buck selling CSAM.
But the political reality is that there are no quick fixes for actual sexual abuse. It is just not politically feasible to put any child under 24-7 video surveillance (and in fact that would probably mess up kids too). The relevant tradeoff is how much you want to treat any father, teacher or sports coach as a possible child molester. But you can't win any votes by moving that tradeoff.
So instead you focus on the creeps watching CSAM, and the technology they use. 80% of the voters don't understand tech, and everyone hates CSAM, so that is a winning strategy.
End-to-end encryption is a technical fix which was widely rolled out when it became apparent to the tech community that the state will snoop on traffic to the maximum extend technically feasible. Similar to how the US founders wanted the population armed so there was a failsafe if the government turned bad, really. Obviously there is some push against E2E, and this is just part of that.
As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids. You know, actual children, most of whom were likely traumatized. And now they want to tell us that if there is some creep who is jerking off to nude pictures of five-year-olds, that is a civilizational emergency and we need to bug everyone's phones to stop it.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error.
I think centrally, the fundamental attribution error is more the inverse, the attribution of outcomes to character traits in others while blaming the situation for one's own outcomes. "He is late because he is unreliable, whereas I am late because I got stuck in traffic." Or, more on the theme, "She lost money because she gambled irresponsibly, whereas I had really bad luck with my stock portfolio."
What you describe here is something along the lines of "my good fortunes come from being hard-working and smart, whereas she merely got lucky."
That being said, I think this bias exists. Anyone can win a hand of poker, or double their investment with some financial instrument. Someone being good at investing would be them making many appropriately-sized bets over a longer period and winning enough of them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.
Is that so? Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?
Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them. For example, a Greenlander might bet on the US invading not because they want the US to invade, but because they anticipate that they will require funds to relocate if Trump invades, similar to how Catastrophe bonds (which sadly are not available for US adventurism) works for their sponsor.
Also, I will come out and say that I would have preferred the outcome where the crewman was taken PoW by Iran not because I am an Ayatollah fanboy (I am not), but purely from a utilitarian perspective, because it would raise the probability of a negotiated peace as opposed to Trump deciding to just bomb the shit out of Iran, which seems unlikely to get the regime to budge but will certainly kill a lot of Iranians. If that makes me your enemy, then your world must be full of them. FWIW, I did not bet on it though.
--
More generally, your rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." is a fully general counterargument for anything from the enlightenment to LW.
A lot of raising of the sanity waterline pissed off normies. The Copernican model. Evolution. HBD. Abolitionism. Suffragettes. Human rights. Pacifism. (I will grant you that there are plenty of horrible things which also piss of normies. We can't conclude anything about the morality of baby murder or Nazism purely from the fact that it pisses normies off.)
It does not help that your straw normie in your post displays all the sophistication of a sports fan betting on his favorite team. That is barely a step up from the small child who decides to close his eyes to make a scary situation go away, or the imbecile blaming his doctor for having cancer after a screening test.
If you run a society in a way which does not offend the 20% with the least cognitive capability, I think what you might get in the long run is something like Afghanistan. If people want to make a prediction market about things which normies find distasteful (and which might be genuinely distasteful, like when some serial killer will strike next), the liberal answer is to tell them that unfortunately, they are living in a free society where there are limits to imposing their sentiments on speech acts.
Also, speaking of things which normies hate, I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.
Nobody is worried about the former. Iran can certainly hire foreign superforecasters to predict all kinds of things, which should work just as well as a prediction market without insider info. This is certainly useful, and presumably every military is doing something like this, but at the end of the day you will only get quantified uncertainty, just like a prediction market for a poker hand might contain a broad range of possibilities.
With insider trading, you get something like a poker market which settles at 90% full house because some of the bettors have seen the hand.
Of course, with this administration, it feels like the primary purpose of Polymarket is to get paid for leaking classified intel. Of course, there are different levels of despicableness. Betting on Trump announcing tariffs an hour before he announces them is bad, but the demonstrable harm is limited. Leaking military secrets regarding ongoing operations tends to be the thing which gets you executed.
From a purely amoral point of view, I would not risk it. A gain of a few tens of thousand dollars seems insufficient compensation against any unknown risks, and if someone close to you makes even more than that, the deed becomes blatantly obvious. Not only would the USG have every incentive to block the payout, even if they could not convince a jury of your guilt, you would still destroy your career and get on the shit list of the USG.
Still, pushing for a ban of that market is basically admitting: "people who have classified intel have the incentive to leak, and we can not fix that."
Given that the US lost a 115M$ Hercules in the rescue, the obvious way to handle this would have been for the CIA to just take over the market. Spending a million on making bets which seem well-informed but are wrong to feed wrong intel to the enemy would probably be worth it.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This is the same SCOTUS which reverted Roe v Wade, because they correctly felt that that decision was legislating from the bench, interpreting stuff into the constitution which was plainly not in it. To rule that the 14th does not say what it says because there is some nitpick about subject to the jurisdiction would be just as much judicial activism as the Roe ruling.
Of course, this would not be the first time that Trump loses 9-0 in the SCOTUS. Other presidents might try to avoid having their cases torn apart by the court, feeling that making arguments which few if any Justices will follow would reflect badly on them, but the Trump administration obviously does not care.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
As Eisenhower remarked,
Every hungry person who is fed, every cold person who is clothed signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those warships which remain unlaunched and those rockets which remain unfired.
Neither military toys nor social programs have an easily determined ROI.
Consider the Manhattan project. For the purpose of winning WW2 at a total cost of 2G$ (e.g. on the order of a percent of the total war budget), it failed to help with defeating the Nazis and arguably was not needed to get Japan to surrender without an invasion.
On the other hand, it also helped to establish the US as a prime superpower and likely prevented a hot war with the USSR. And in the counterfactual world where the Nazis had worked on nukes in earnest, it would have prevented them gaining a monopoly on them. So it is hard to put the ROI in monetary terms.
For evaluating social programs, there are two approaches. One is to look at them from an utilitarian/EA perspective, but this requires terminal values like preferring people not to die of starvation. The other is to look at them from the perspective of buying social peace: one good reason to feed the poor is that they are not likely to peacefully watch their kids die of starvation when you do not have food programs. Instead, most of them would turn to crime to feed their kids. In a country where food is cheap and labor is rather expensive, it is probably cost-effective to just feed the poor rather than hiring enough police (and lawyers and prison guards) to neutralize any food riots. Relatedly, the other disruptive thing the poor can do even before they turn to crime is vote. Capitalism can create immense amounts of wealth, but this is unlikely to persuade poor people who feel that they do not profit from it personally. So social programs can be also seen as a bribe, where society gives the poor a cut of the spoils so they don't rock the boat. Still, I will concede that it is just as hard to quantify these benefits as it is with military spending.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
It seems rather clear to me that in a war with China, every participant would lose. I am bearish on it staying contained, for one thing.
Any war involving Taiwan will involve striking military installations on China's soil. Typically, these things escalate. After Hegseth bombs the first Chinese school through carelessness, China may well feel that it is in their interest to make US civilians bleed as well, and unlike Iran they are probably able to do so. And if there ever was an administration which I do not trust to have the strategic savviness to avoid a war turning nuclear, it was the current one.
But even if a US-China war stayed confined, it would be devastating for the global economy. Between sanctions and blockades, most of the international trade in SE Asia would come to a halt. Neither side has much hope to push the other side out, never mind regime change. A war is unlikely to end with the US ceding their Asian interests to China, nor with the US invading Peking and installing a new regime. So both sides have far much more to lose than they have to win.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable.
To his credit, Trump is working on that. The oil trade was long denominated in dollars because the US had an outsized influence on it. Being readily convertible to fossil fuels is one of the reasons why the US$ made a good reserve currency, which is a reason why many countries are stockpiling it and thus subsidizing the US debt (as inflation slowly eats up the value of their dollar reserves).
Under Trump, the US has not been a good steward of the global oil trade. When Iran predictably closed the Strait (because this is the one way they can exert pressure on the rest of the world), Trump loudly declared that this was not his mess to fix. Let Europe deal with it if they want the oil. And I am sure that Europe will deal with it eventually, though not through military means. At the end of the day, we will probably just pay Iran to let the ships through. But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.
After all, China seems like a sane, reliable superpower. Sure, they are troublesome for their neighbors (Taiwan first and foremost, though Venezuela might claim that their regional superpower does not respect the autonomy of smaller states), but unlikely to invade Spain or Germany. So far, China has refrained to wreck the world economy in some military adventure.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
There is obviously a trade-off between competence and loyalty. But where exactly the Pareto frontier runs is dependent on the specifics, like the field you want people to be competent in and the cause or person to which you want them to be loyal.
Finding a die-hard MAGA car mechanic or a die-hard SJ kindergarten teacher is easier than the opposite, for example.
Trump now is selecting for personal loyalty, like some generalissimo. However, what he can offer his vassals in exchange for their fealty is much less than what your average dictator can offer. He has about one year with majorities in Congress left, and then two years more as a lame duck president without majorities (unless he dies first). Most of the prospective candidates have longer time horizons than that. Unlike the Ayatollah, it seems unlikely that he will be succeeded by one of his sons; instead there will likely be some renewal of the Republican party after his death, and having been part of his cabinet might not enhance your career. On top of that, he is likely to push you under the bus whenever it is convenient for him. Noem and Bondi were loyal, whatever unpopular decisions they made certainly did have Trump's backing when they made them. I mean, being the fall guy/gal for the president is part of being part of an administration, but it certainly feels like Trump has more need of them than other presidents did.
Contrast this with SCOTUS appointments. If Trump had to nominate a new Justice tomorrow, I am sure there would be no shortage of accomplished conservative candidates (unless he foolishly insisted that they are loyal to him above the constitution).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative.
I think that there are two disjoint subsets of readers. One subset (including both you and me) prefers literature which has an obvious, engaging plotline. The other subset seems to prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring books which are utterly unreadable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of meaning.
For class membership signalling, saying that you have read The Lord of the Rings will prove little. After all, the books are very readable even if you stay on the surface level and never engage with the deeper levels of meaning. By contrast, saying that you have read some postmodern novel which is utterly unreadable on the surface level will assure your class peers that you are one of them.
Personally, I am a bit less prescriptivist about it than you are, as long as nobody is making other people read books without an engaging plot. (Decades later, I am still bitter about having been made to read Tod in Venedig and Effi Briest in school. Admittedly, neither was postmodern -- they both had some excuse of a plot -- but the surface level plot was thin as hell, something which could be paraphrased in two pages.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
First off, I am not a neocon (I was opposed to GWB's Iraq war for example), and don't know how good I a am at the ideological Turing test.
Still, I would say that execution matters. In Iraq and even Afghanistan, the US at least managed to achieve some strategic objectives, like toppling the regimes. A neocon might argue that the bombings were means to an end. (Of course, in my point of view, neither operation achieved a desirable long term strategic outcome.)
Afghanistan was a blunder but at least not an obvious blunder, I am sure that some people predicted that the nation-building would fail, but I was personally not certain of that.
With Trump's Iran war, the blunder is obvious immediately. He gambled on regime change through bombing, and his gamble failed, and he does not have a plan B which is why he is bullshitting about Iran surrendering any day now.
(bombing brown people)
Every ethnicity in Iran is light skinned, and the dominant one has an extremely long history of civilization. Are Chinamen 'brown people'? Russians?
This phrasing annoyed some people, including @Shakes. I apologize, also for being factually incorrect as you point out.
What I meant to suggest was that for the US, killing people in far-away lands which are of different (particular Muslim) cultures is just Tuesday. I think the USG began using drone strikes to blow up weddings beginning in 2010 under Nobel laureate Obama and continuing under Trump. The median voter did not give a damn. My phrasing meant to suggest that few voters cared because the victims were not Caucasians. I certainly did not mean to suggest that I bought into any framework where 'brown' people mattered less personally. I do realize that I am posting on a forum where such views exist, so that was a failure to clearly communicate on my part.
On reflection, I do not think the racism answer for drone death apathy is quite true. The CW waves created by police shooting innocent blacks by mistake are second to none. I think that it is more a case of Newtonian Ethics. People in Afghanistan or Iran are far removed from Americans both in space and social graphs. My personal guess is that the US military killing Australians would upset the voters a lot more. Sure, Australia is also far away, but they speak English and their most recent common cultural ancestor is much more recent.
Of course, Trump has shown the median voter also do not care about him blowing up "drug smuggling" ships presumably crewed by Hispanics, which are both culturally and spatially closer to the US. I am a bit puzzled why that is. It might just be opportunity to oppose, though: in foreign matters, the president has a lot of leeway, so activists can not do much to stop him from ordering military strikes. On US soil, his power is much more limited, so activists can oppose him for sending in ICE or the like.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height
Given that this is an allegory for the real world, I want to strongly reject your assertion that people equate moral status with intelligence. The way I see it, intelligence is a capability which is roughly orthogonal to morality, just like capital or good looks or being great at a sport are. If you are smart or rich, you simply have the ability to make decisions with stronger moral impacts, while someone who is neither is much less likely to make a difference larger than a few 100 QALYs.
I mean, the people racing to AGI certainly have tens of IQ points on me, and I certainly do not consider themselves my moral superior for that any more than I would consider Epstein my moral superior simply because he had access to vastly more capital than I do.
It is certainly fashionable on the SJ college-educated left to hate proles (who presumably average a few IQ points less than them), and I personally do consider voting for Trump a moral failing, but ultimately the responsibility for Trump rests mostly with the elites -- some of which support him, and some of which decided that poor rural White people did not matter.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
My question was not original, in fact, I might have seen it months or even a year ago, when it went viral because current models failed to answer it correctly.
So there might be three possible explanations:
(1) Models just got better and can solve this now.
(2) It appeared widely in the training data so models know how to answer it.
(3) AI companies explicitly patched their models to correctly answer that question (just like they might fix jailbreaks or outrage bait).
For all I know it could definitely be (1).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Thanks for the link with the puzzles, I tried a few, and while I think I found the solution to two random ones I picked, I took some minutes for one of them, certainly among the three most brain-straining tasks I did today. (One of the others involved realizing that you can not mirror the pinout of a two-row 1.27mm connector by turning it 180 degrees, so take my assessment with sufficient sodium chloride.)
I mean, you could probably make an IQ 100 human solve them if you gave them an hour, threatened them with death and gave them enough ketamine to suppress the panic, but due to legal constraints you will get less mileage out of your employees on most workdays.
Basically, I concur that present models are not AGI, but I am much less certain that the median white color worker has much of a moat. If LLMs come for my job in two years, the fact that this proves that my job did not require general intelligence will be of little solace.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Yes. I imagine that 'write python code to count the number of times the letter "r" appears in the word "strawberry"' is easily within the reach of current LLMs.
A better example example would be "Is the pool of the Titanic full or empty?", which is easily answerable by any five-year old who has ever played with a plastic ship in a bathtub, but which LLMs did badly on because they did not have the visual intuition of a sunken ship.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Come on. Poland gave 4.5 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine, a country which is fighting a very bloody war with Russia. Obviously Poland believes that NATO will protect them from Russian aggression (which is a reasonable assumption when Trump is not president).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Is this not rather a sign of TDS? Kagan spends decades advocating war with Iran, hates Trump; Trump delivers war with Iran, now Kagan is against the war.
Have you read the excerpt? Kagan is obviously a fan of the US being the leader of the free world (a model which worked well enough for the Western world during the Cold War). I would imagine that his policy (which is more or less that of GWB) is the antithesis of Trump's foreign policy, superfluous similarities (bombing brown people) aside.
In guess in his model, a regime change operation in Iran would work differently.
First, Iran would have to violate the JCPOA so badly that most signatories would agree that it was not salvageable, because unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty would damage the image of the US as a reliable partner. (For Trump, Obama's signature was reason enough -- he clearly does not give a fuck about how other countries see the US.)
Then, the US would try to form a broad coalition, come up with a strategic plan to actually achieve the objectives, think about the obvious Iran countermeasures and how to block them, wait until the troops are in the area and then attack.
Trump did none of these things. He looked at the polling, saw that he would lose the mid-terms between Epstein and ICE, and decided to bomb Iran in a bid to cause regime change from the air. Unlike with Venezuela, he lost his gamble and did not achieve any strategic objectives, because no, blowing up missiles is not a strategic objective.
Your comment makes me update towards the real syndrome being TDSS, where people accuse others of having TDS -- treating the same actions differently when done by Trump -- when in fact the actions of Trump are at best vaguely similar.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
OT side notice:
Blackstone is usually the baseline for founding-era American legal thought [...]
Foremost for Blackstone is allegiance (weirdly shortened to ligeance in a few places) -- those born within the realm owe "natural allegiance" immediately on their birth. Indeed, Blackstone doesn't even believe you have the right to renounce this, stating that it is "a debt of gratitude; which cannot be forfeited, cancelled, or altered, by any change of time, place, or circumstance, nor by any thing but the united concurrence of the legislature".
While I get that Blackstone was an Englishmen, I find it a bit rich that US legal thought should be based on him.
The US was founded by people who defected from what Blackstone would consider their rightful king. In fact, eight of the signers of the declaration of independence appear to have been born in the Old World. One might perhaps weasel around how the declaration of independence was not a defection for the people born in the colonies, because they remained loyal to the government of their colony or some such, but someone born in England coming to the New World and renouncing the king has pretty much rejected the natural allegiance thing. As did any immigrants who came later.
Not that I have a problem with any of that, I firmly believe one's allegiance to one's country of birth is a useful default but certainly not unconditional. If one's country is fucked up enough, an utilitarian has a duty to defect.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
That is probably true for a carrier group, but I don't think the US can airlift destroyers to the middle of Iran.
My understanding is that so far, they have used high-flying jets to attack Iran with impunity. I would expect that helicopters might be more vulnerable. Also, we don't know yet how many short range missiles and drones Iran can launch in the middle of their country.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I will grant you that the US military has been extremely competent on an operational level so far, but this seems a mission straight from hell.
Iranian enrichment facilities are deep underground. You will not capture them with working elevators. Expect to dig through tens of meters of rubble (if you are lucky) or concrete (if you are not). Of course, the WSJ piece is overly optimistic when it expects that the UF6 will still be in cylinders by the time you get there. At the very least, I would expect it to be blown all over the place. Though I would actually expect the regime to find a a few hundred tons of a cheap substance to mix it in. Obviously not D-UF6, as that would undo the enrichment work, but something which is easily separable within a month or so. I imagine even mixing it with sand would be annoying, perhaps requiring you to heat 100 tons of sand to get it to sublime. Though I am sure that the Iranians have found something nastier. Plus whatever traps you can imagine.
The people on the surface defending the site will not have a better time than your engineers. I mean, obviously you could turn anything within artillery range into Gaza and kill another 50k civilians in the process, but then you might as well nuke their site and call it a day. To interdict infantry from getting into range you would need a continuous bombardment of a sort which would make WW1's Western Front like a skirmish (though admittedly in a much smaller area). For a week or however long your engineers need.
And your excavators can't exactly hide underground, so you need a plan to protect them from every single drone, shell or rocket Iran might try to hit them with.
Nor is it very feasible to just bring your own depleted uranium to undo their enrichment process and leaving it on site. The problem here is that of half the separation work is going from 0.7% to 2% or so. So to undo most of the separation work of 400kg 60% U-235, you would need to ship in 24 tons of depleted uranium in the same chemical form, then mix it really well.
This shows the larger problem: even if it is feasible to airlift HEU out, what are you going to do about the 10% enriched uranium? This already has 85% of the separation work required for 60% HEU in it, but it is also 6 times less portable. Iran could trivially undo the last 15% of separation work and leave you having to scrape up 2.4 tons instead of 400kg.
physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.
Only if you can do so without paying too high a price. If you end up with Iran killing 100 soldiers and capturing another 20 while also spending a couple of dozen billions, Iran might decide that you are welcome back any time.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
You understand Americans largely aren't actually hurt by this.
My understanding is that unlike the gulf states, where oil is the main export, for the US oil is more of a side hustle (on the order of 10% of the total exports or so). A higher oil price will tank the world economy, and that will hurt US exports in other areas far more than their increased revenue from selling oil.
There is a reason that the US has been very active in the ME for longer than I have been alive, and charitably it comes down to the US faring worse if the oil price skyrockets. There is also the fact that the global oil trade is mostly conducted in dollars, which enables the US deficit as countries stockpile US currency.
If the US decides that they have their own oil and don't care about the global market, before long oil will be traded in yuan.
I will grant you though that a high oil price will hurt other Western countries more than it hurts the US, but then again it does not take a lot of economic hurt to lose an election.
This would be a salient argument if the only children not raised by their biological parents were either orphans or adopted by gay people.
But reality is different. Gay marriage did not destroy marriage, instead marriage was destroyed long before that. People marry, have kids, then divorce. Or just get pregnant outside of committed relationships. Parents have their kids taken away because they are terrible parents.
Now, you could institute a regime where these cases were avoided. Perhaps you make abortion mandatory for any pregnancy where the parents are unable to prove that they will stay together with a probability higher than 0.95. Or you just extract gametes from everyone after puberty and then sterilize them, and rely on IVF for couples after they convince an expert panel that they will make great parents. Or you just make people require such an expert panel for marriage and make PIV sex outside marriage illegal.
So far, I have not seen any conservatives arguing for any of that. Your 'injustice' lives in every single parent family, and your 'pretense' in any patchwork family. In fact, the pro-lifers are actively creating more of that -- nobody believes that a crack addicted prostitute who got pregnant will become clean and form a happy fairy tale family with her former client just because you force here to have the child.
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