quiet_NaN
11hr ago
Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. [...] In both cases, these movements win by preserving (or fostering) their own will to fight, while degrading the enemy’s will to fight.
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
I think that is important to outline here at the beginning, because there is a tendency in the broader culture to read non-violence purely as a moral position, as an unwillingness to engage in violence. And to be fair, proponents of non-violence often stress its moral superiority – in statements and publications which are themselves strategic – and frequently broader social conversations which would prefer not to engage with the strategic nature of protest, preferring instead impotent secular saints, often latch on to those statements. But the adoption of non-violent approaches is a strategic choice made because non-violence offers, in the correct circumstances substantial advantages as a strategy (as well as being, when it is possible, a morally superior approach).
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction.
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
First, I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.
He continues:
While protestors do attempt to impose a significant degree of friction on DHS immigration enforcement by (legally!) following and documenting DHS actions, that has also served as the predicate for the classic formula for non-violent action: it baits the agents of the state (ICE and CBP) into open acts of violence on camera which in turn reveal the violent nature of immigration enforcement.
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma. Their most enthusiastic supporters very much want to see high spectacle immigration enforcement [...] But [the administration] desperately needs them out of the news to avoid catastrophic midterm wipeout. But ‘go quiet’ on immigration and lose core supporters; go ‘loud’ on immigration and produce more viral videos that enrage the a larger slice of the country. A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. 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. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
I think that the "large fraction" of men is actually closer than your 50/2M.
Consider a hypothetical woman whose kink it is to have men fuck her while she is unconscious. So she explains that to her tinder dates. "I will let you record a short video statement of me consenting for legal purposes, then drink my roofie and as soon as I am unconscious, you can perform certain sex acts we agreed upon beforehand."
Do you honestly believe that 99% of men would go ewww and quit their date right there?
My prediction would be that there would be 10-30% for which that kink would be a hard no. Perhaps 5-10% would be really into it. The remainder would find that it makes sex less enjoyable for them. Some would be able to arrange another fuckdate on short notice which they anticipate will lead to hotter sex. The others would likely take her up on her offer -- it might not be the best sex of their lives, but it beats jerking off.
That is to say, a majority of men on tinder would likely be willing to go along with having sex with an unconscious woman, as long as there are no ethical or legal obstacles. I do not think that this tells us anything about men except that a lot of them are underfucked and will prefer suboptimal sex to no sex.
In the French case, it seems very unlikely that the husband contacted 2M men and only got 50 to take him up on his offer.
From an evopsych point of view, I would imagine that by inclination, most men are born indifferent about consent, just as we are born without much in the way of inhibition towards killing members of our outgroup or stealing from them. The pro-social preferences for not raping, murdering or stealing all have to be taught, and just like we sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against murder, we also sometimes fail to instill a deep preference against rape.
Presumably (I did not read deeply into the case), the husband searched his accomplices in forums where the norms about consent were horribly absent, perhaps some telegram channel related to upskirt photos. This might explain why he found so many without anyone reporting him to the cops.
At the end of the day, my feeling is that there is a significant minority of people who are severely misaligned, and only the threat of punishment keeps them from defecting. His accomplices were simply taking up his offer because they believed that their crimes would be much less likely to be discovered compared to rapes they might commit on their own.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If this is the case, then we're dealing with something a lot more like a cult or, more geopolitically relevant, something similar to how ISIS spread so quickly after their initial emergence. That does concern me.
I do not think the cult-label you apply to the ICE-protesters points to a useful set in thingspace.
Let us consider daesh for a minute. They were not a new ideological movement. Islamic fundamentalism was not new, their end goal of a state running on sharia law long established. What changed was merely the circumstances -- e.g. the government of Iraq was a lot less powerful than it had been previously, and the Jihadists took their chance.
For all their differences to daesh, the anti-ICE protests are not a new ideology either. It is simply Social Justice Progressivism. The only thing which has changed is the situation, and thus the tactics. The leftist idea that if the government comes to round up your neighbors, you do not stand idly on the sidewalk as the Germans did is not exactly new.
The likely result is that the federal government can not effectively enforce immigration policy without the support of the state and local authorities -- at least not without losing the support of the majority. You can find that concerning, but it is arguably not 'imminent civil war' level of concerning. For one thing, the protesters embrace non-violent tactics -- which is clever on their part, but happily also limits the number of casualties. For another, their tactics do not generalize to other areas -- Trump's tariffs are not in danger from being defeated on a local level, for one thing.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that the 3d printing thing is a stupid moral panic.
First, 3d printing is not a favorable technique to produce guns from the scratch. Nor would I even want a 3d-printed modification device to turn a reliable semiautomatic AR-15 into a burst-capable AR-15 of dubious reliability.
The fact that a competent craftsman with a machine shop can build a decent firearm has been true for as long as the US has been around. Today, I guess you can partly replace the technical expertise by just using a CNC milling machine. (Of course, it helps tremendously that semi firearms are legal. If I tried to mill my own AK-47 in Europe, the hard part would be building a rifled barrel. In the US, I could just buy one.)
I do not see hordes of 15yo school shooters using the CNCs they got for their birthdays to build automatic weapons. Probably because CNCs are well outside the birthday present price range for most Americans, and getting from them to a working gun is still a long process, while semi firearms are easily sourced from the glove compartments of cars.
If I was running a criminal gang, I might well decide that automatic firearms are not worth the trouble. Routinely carrying them will just give the state the license to imprison you for long times whenever they catch you, which seems a bad trade-off. If I decided that I needed auto guns for gang warfare or the like, I would certainly procure them (or conversion kits) through trusted criminal channels instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Nevertheless, if I ever felt the need to download some 3d files related to firearms I plan to commit crimes with, I would be sure to use Tor over some public Wifi instead of going to myillegalfirearms dot com or whatever, which will be monitored by the feds.
I also think that LLMs might just render what little point the DAs might have had here moot.
A technical drawing of the parts of an assault rifle seems pretty clearly protected speech, it is instructions aimed at a human. Possibly, the US patent office is hosting such drawings (though they might not be in sufficient detail). Soon, any idiot will just be able to take such technical drawings and ask an LLM to turn it into a 3d file suitable for milling. And the guardrails will only work on models which have them, sooner or later I will be able to download a DeepSeek model capable of working with 3d files which lacks them.
Of course, that just kicks the can down the road one step: I don't think anyone would be happier if Louisiana just gave abortion providers civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down, then arrested them when they showed up for their day in court for the criminal trial.
I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think it depends on what performance you require. If your legal troubles are something which might see you locked up for a few years or ruined financially, it is probably worth it to get a lawyer, and a lawyer who is a domain expert at that.
On the other hand, if you are being sued for 10k$, and your case seems straightforward, the performance advantage of a meatbag lawyer might not actually be worth it in the expected outcome.
For example, if my net worth was 20k$ and I was in the middle of divorce proceedings, I would likely trust an LLM with arguing my case (and explaining the process to me in as much detail as I would care to know about) rather than spending a couple of grands on a divorce attorney.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
First, I am amazed by the selective stupidity of people. A teenager getting sued by the RIAA (do they still exist?) for downloading a copyrighted mp3-file going to the big LLMs for advice is something I can see. I have no idea how to commit a 300M$ securities fraud in the first place, but if I did I would probably find a spare couple of thousands to discuss my troubles with a lawyer in person.
Also, this is a priesthood ruling that entities who are not ordained priests are not allowed to function as priests. Zero surprise there.
Your workaround would rely on straw lawyers who just start the chat and leave answering the questions to the LLM. The problem with that approach is that it makes the lawyer liable for all the answers the LLM gives you. After all, if you are in a privileged discussion of your legal woes with your lawyer, and a third party opines that if you just confess to everything, you will not be punished, you would reasonably expect your lawyer to refute that claim, and might sue them if they did not.
The same incentives which makes court not recognize LLM communication as privileged even if it covers topics traditionally covered by lawyers would also make them go after any lawyers who start a LLM session and then do not verify the responses.
I think that this is a case where a technical solution is much more apt to solve the problem than a legal one -- just as it is much easier to encrypt your communication than to prevent the NSA from snooping on it.
In most criminal cases, the FBI has no backdoor to the devices of the suspect (and if the NSA does they would not be willing for that fact to become common knowledge just to convict some fraudster). Also, it seems unlikely that they will have hit random IT service providers with an order to record all communication of a suspect. (NSLs do not cover content, but I guess a judge could likewise force a party to record and gag them about that fact.)
Much more likely is that you and the LLM provider will be hit with a subpoena for recorded information. Thus it is sufficient to ensure that there is no record of your conversation. So you want a LLM provider which does not keep records without a court order, which is probably something you can get at enterprise level. And then you simply buy a thumb drive, install Ubuntu (or whatever) on it, boot it, have your little discussion, turn off your PC and microwave the drive. (Sending a transcript to your meatbag lawyer is riskier but not tremendously so, my understanding is that the courts generally do not snoop on lawyer communication in case there is something not covered by client-attorney-privilege. Just do not use your normal mail account!)
Of course, the seriously paranoid will want to run an open-weight LLM locally instead, or at least use a Chinese one whose operators are much less likely to cooperate with US authorities.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Historical fiction is still fiction. A novel which represents the historian's consensus would be entirely unreadable -- if our best estimate of the probability that A and B were having an affair is 0.5, you would have to write a superposition novel to be historically accurate.
I think the problem is more one of the readers (or viewers) treating a work as more accurate than it actually is. This is a problem both of works which use historical figures, but also can involve works which merely contain historical elements (like characters fighting with swords). For example, readers of ASOIAF (or viewers of GoT) might think they get an understanding of how medieval power worked. Or reading Ken Follet and thinking you understand medieval people, as you mentioned.
There is now a whole sub-genre of media reviews over at acoup in which the pedant objects to that. Some of it is nitpicking, like insisting that logistics in Westeros should make any sense. Others are a bit more serious, like the whole child soldier initiation through murder thing of Sparta which somehow gets skipped in popular accounts, thereby massively distorting the popular understanding of that society.
I guess to be safe from accusations of distorting history, science fiction is a much safer bet than fantasy (especially if it is fantasy with low magic density, where most armies rely on swords and spears). Frank Herbert is getting little heat for his depiction of space feudalism because nobody will read Dune and think they know how the Holy Roman Empire worked. Likewise, the Jedi are so far removed from European knights that nobody will mistake the one for the other, while GRRM's Sers are conceptionally close to the European knight.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This seems very plausible. On the other hand, society is generally chill about most mass shooters carrying the Y chromosome, I am sure that the take 'you can prevent violence by aborting your male fetus' exists somewhere but I have not stumbled upon it.
This seems entirely fair, most men do not engage in horrific violence, after all.
However, then it seems also fair to apply similar standards to trans women -- sure, they may be over-represented compared to cis men in shootings, but the violent ones still form a tiny minority.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
"The mass shooter was female" is the best concession they're going to get. Because the truth- that this was violence the entire progressive political stack (by its own rules) is directly and solely responsible for- is an inconvenient one.
So far, I did not see any evidence that this was politically motivated. Presumably your hedging of 'by its own rules' means something like 'if a member of the outgroup does something bad, we can blame the outgroup for it', and I am sure you have some story of some Trump supporter having a psychotic episode and shooting up a shopping mall getting spun as MAGA violence.
If there is some indication of political motive, like the shooter planning to kill some TERF teachers, then blaming the SJ movement is still a bit silly but fair.
Otherwise, bad faith behavior does not become acceptable just because the other side does it occasionally, I am sure a SJ supporter would find many spins from MAGA which I would condemn them for emulating.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
At the moment, this is the seventh most viewed story on the Guardian.
They call her by her preferred pronouns, but also mention that she was trans:
“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.
Naturally they do not spin it as 'trans shooter' but mainly focus on mental health issues, which I find fair enough.
So if you are implying that the woke MSM is burying the story I think you are mistaken.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Killing a high ranking military official isn't terrorism.
Not if you are in a war with them. (Looking at Trump).
Either he was killed by the Ukranians, in which case he's a completely legitimate military target
Sure. However, there are rules against perfidy. Presumably, whoever shot him was not wearing an uniform of Ukrainian armed forces.
Not that I am too upset about it, though. Posing as a civilian in Moscow is unlikely to real civilians there getting killed by mistake. And killing generals is probably the most ethical way to conduct a war there is.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
A technicality of a treaty giving you citizenship does not make you American.
Legally, it does.
What other definition do you propose? I know one when I see one? I think most people would have problems telling apart a Canadian who has worked in the US for a decade from a US citizen.
And what are the American values, which were shared by quasi-aristocratic Chevaliers, unruly Borderers, strict Puritans, French Southerners, German and Irish immigrants, Texan Hispanics, descendants of slaves, and so forth? I mean, besides "don't have dances with copulation movements in them"?
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The way Donald Trump won the primaries was basically by outrage-baiting the liberals.
This seems like Bad Bunny adopting the same playbook. The more Trump tweets about how horrible the halftime show was, the less he spends on issues where he can actually do damage.
Edit: Empire which America is should never degrade itself especially on the big stages.
There are important differences between Westeros and the US, though. A liberal democracy will always have to tolerate that someone is degrading the country.
The US had always a bit of its own style in displaying power. Where the USSR or China would have big military parades, the US had nothing of that sort.
A basic rule of social classes is that if you need to conspicuously advertise your class, you are not very secure in your class. A well-established member of the upper class can just buy food from a hot dog stand, because he does not need to fear being mistaken for one of their usual customers by other members of his class.
The US did not have military parades because its military power was not in doubt. It did not need to bedazzle visitors with opulent presidential palaces (the White House mostly being from an earlier era).
Also, no halftime show can match the self-degradation of the US displayed during the 2025 presidential election and the presidency which followed, where any responsible top would long have used their safe word to stop the scene. Between Biden's dementia and Trump being Trump, it definitely turned the US into laughingstock. Clinton's Oral Office sounded straightforward respectable in comparison to Trump's toddler tantrums about not getting a Nobel or Greenland. He could spend half the federal budget on rebuilding the White House out of gold and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful.
Agreed. I would like to add that while subsistence farming is quite bad, sugar cane is even worse from the implications. It is not a staple food, but a luxury item for trade (in the forms of sugar and rum), generally overseas. If you are searching for the perfect image of evil exploitative European colonialism, you could do worse than a cane plantation.
The chances that a manual plantation worker will make a decent fraction of the profits from these goods is basically nil. Either they are enslaved, or they are part of a large pool of unskilled labor and thus easily replaced if they get any ideas about striking, or if they hack off half their ankle by accident.
So picking that as a theme for a show seems to be in somewhat poor taste, just like 'underage slum sex work' would be a branch of Latin American economy you would not want to use to celebrate your country.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
If you say to the unjustly convicted man that his trial was only somewhat unfair, most people will realize you're talking nonsense.
I think your binary justly convicted vs unjustly convicted only covers a minority of cases, generally the ones where there is a dispute of fact -- did he do it or not to the act.
For more cases, there is some sliding quantity differentiating legal conduct from criminal behavior. Having sex with someone who can not consent due to being blackout drunk is illegal, having sex with someone who had half a glass of wine is legal, so there is some grey area in the middle where you are less than 100% guilty but also less than 100% innocent, and a jury might reasonably reach either verdict. Likewise for killing someone while going over the speed limit.
I do not believe that. A Minneapolis jury will absolutely convict. Both in the Pretti case AND the Good case.
That does not mean that it is unfair. If the jury would also convict if Pretti had shot first, injuring an ICE officer, then I would grant you that there is no justice to be found from them.
As it is, the shooters -- particularly in the Pretti case -- are not clearly innocent. "We heard a gunshot and then we put ten rounds into some nearby person we thought was armed" is a pretty big fuckup. Even normal cops might go to jail for that if it was caught from multiple cameras. Regular citizens or gang members will definitely go to jail for it. The case against the Good shooter is weaker, but also something where I would not call it a miscarriage of justice if it a guilty verdict was delivered for a similar case in resulting from a neighborhood argument.
"A jury will absolutely convict [for particular cases]" is not an argument that a trial is unfair. Few people were surprised when Charles Manson was found guilty of murder -- the known facts would have made any other outcome unlikely. The test is if they would also have convicted him of unlikely charges like invading Poland, shooting Lincoln, or using witchcraft to cause stillbirths. If jury would have been willing to convict him of these, then I would concede that he did not get a fair trial.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Certainly there is no John Adams type in Minnesota willing to ensure the ICE agents would get a fair trial there.
I think that the fairness of a trial is a sliding scale rather than a boolean quantity. Juries have their own sentiments and are made of humans, not of personifications of the abstract concept of justice.
Say that unfairness is a quality between zero and one. At zero, judges and jury are perfectly impartial. At one, they are willing to disregard conclusive evidence to get the outcome they want -- convict someone of crimes they clearly did not commit, just because they hate them.
There are a lot of examples of trials where the unfairness is significantly more than zero. A black man standing accused of raping a white woman in Texas in 1952. A violent jihadist in NYC in 2003. An open Neo-Nazi accused of tax fraud in SF in 2020.
However, this does not mean that justice is better served by not having them tried, though I concede that there exists some level of unfairness where a guilty verdict is assured, and I would not want to send anyone to such a court (at least if I was not very much convinced of their guilt).
For the ICE shooters, I think the biggest difference from SOP would be that they would not get the cop bonus from prosecutors and juries. This does not automatically mean that they are found guilty.
I imagine that the verdict would be similar as if Pretti had been shot during a funeral procession of the Hell's Angels he was disturbing with other protesters. In the end, it depends on the details more than how sympathetic the defendants are. I could totally see circumstances where a jury would rightfully acquit the Hell's Angels or ICE (e.g. if the other person drew his gun and pointed it towards them). Sadly, from the facts we know of the Pretti shooting, this does not seem to be such a case. From what I have seen in the footage so far, I would even convict normal cops who were out in the streets stopping drug dealers or whatever. To excuse such trigger-happiness, I would have to assume that Minnesota is also a war zone and every day ICE agents get blown up or something.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Germany
The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination
So it would be more accurate to say that the ages 14 and 15 are a grey area. (Arguably, that grey area extends further (probably all the way to infinity) if alcohol is involved, which likely covers the majority of new sex partners. A judge might view the ability of a 16yo to consent after two beers lot differently than that of a 26yo. And of course sex work is 18+ only.)
To be honest, I was not even aware of the AoC being 14 in Germany. When I was 25, the thought to try to find an underage girlfriend genuinely did not even cross my mind. I strongly suspect that a man who decides to groom 15yo's does not have their best interests at heart. However, I also acknowledge that things do not always go according to plan, and sometimes people just fall in love over age gaps most would consider inappropriate.
I think just handing the power to the younger partner to decide if they want to press charges rather than investigating ex officio is probably a good compromise.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that I do not see a good reason to apply different AoC's for different combinations of sexes, so your proposal would also legalize gay men grooming 15yo boys, which I intuitively find as unacceptable as straight men grooming girls of a similar age.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better,
I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war. Ukraine will most certainly be worse off than if they had just written of the Crimea and the two 'rebel' oblasts. Russia will most certainly be worse off than if Putin had never invaded.
that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.
If the West had simply wanted to stop the fighting, we could just not have supported Ukraine, thus allowing Putin to win decisively. We supported them both for moral and pragmatic reasons: punishing defectors to the international rule-based order when we can is good, and weakening a big NATO opponent by making the wars they are waging disastrously expensive in people and materiel is sound strategy.
Last time I checked (which is a while ago), the main obstacles to a peace deal were that Russia wanted territory it does not currently hold and Ukraine wants some security guarantee so that it does not find Russia coming for the next slice in a decade.
At the end of the day, the people who need to be convinced of a peace deal are Zelenskyy and Putin. If they want to make peace, there is little the US or Europe could do to stop them. Europe being more willing to support Ukraine than Trump is hardly feels like 'evil EU thwarting Peacebringer Trump's visionary plan for peace'.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
One of the most scathing critiques of Social Justice is that the same kind of busybody middle class older women who would report young women to their landlords for having a male visitor in their room in 1950 are now ostracizing people for doing a racism or whatever.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I'm also happy to acknowledge that acquittal doesn't necessarily mean a lack of guilt, but I don't think the British judicial system is so corrupt that it represents null evidence.
If you are using judicial verdicts to update your world view as if they were unbiased (in the statistical sense) estimators of guilt, you are doing it wrong.
Suppose a parent shows up at a hospital with a non-verbal, injured child, displaying injuries of a type which is generally thought to be caused by violence in 85-95% of the cases and accidents in 5-15% of the cases, as estimated by different domain experts. Suppose that there is no further evidence to be found either way -- the parent denies using violence, and there is no video of how the kid got injured.
The way I have constructed the example, there is only one possible outcome in a fair criminal trial: acquittal due to reasonable doubt, as the courts would rather let ten guilty go free than sentence one innocent.
A guilty verdict is very strong evidence of guilt. A verdict of 'not proven' is very weak evidence of factual innocence (as opposed to legal innocence).
I imagine this can lead to cases where two people who had a gunfight can both get away with claiming self defense. If we try A and find we have to acquit him because it is plausible that they acted in self defense, we obviously can not base a trial on B around the finding that A was innocent as far as the law could tell.
For the Braveheart thing, I do not really have a horse in the race. On priors, I would find it more likely that young men harass some underage girls than that some underage girls get out of their way to threaten some young immigrant men, but stranger things than the latter have happened.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
This is what suggests to me that the situation is pure power politics. The reason for the face coverings is targeted harassment, doxing, stalking, and even violence.
Last time I checked, ICE was in the lead 2:0 as far as the body count in Minneapolis was concerned. To the degree that the SJ left is coordinated, it certainly has not picked a strategy of grievous bodily harm. Sure, there might be outliers, but city cops deal with that every damn day -- with the additional kicker that the people they antagonize are much more likely to live a chill 20 minute drive from their families' homes.
I think that the main reason ICE agents hide their faces is not that they fear violence. Instead, the SJ left has plenty of ways to ostracize people which they do not like which are legal. ICE agents might find themselves getting kicked out of blue area bars, or their dating prospects reduced to the women who do not have SJ girlfriends they want to keep, which seems perfectly fine to me. Plus some harassment which is not fine, of course.
OTOH, having ICE agent act like masked stormtroopers is not only terrible optics, is also removes one of the few remaining checks on them. When ICE shoots someone, the Trump administration declares that shooting justified and praiseworthy within hours. ICE will not help with any state investigation because federal forces enjoy immunity. And the federal investigation will be lead by the very same administration who already decided the outcome before the victim's corpse was cold. If the shooters are never identified publicly, (which clearly was the idea of the Trump administration), then that is the end of the story, unless you get a Democrat administration in three years and Trump does not bother to shred the FBI report.
With the shooters identified on video, the loved one's at least know who fired the shots, and even if the shooters do not face criminal consequences, they can at least be punished by ostracism similar to OJ Simpson.
Part of applying violence on behalf of a democratic government is that you are willing to do so openly. If you believe that something is morally right and the will of the people, you should be willing to show your face. I am sure that the 101st Airborne was not particularly popular in the South when they escorted the Little Rock Nine to school in 1957. Yet they did not cover their faces, even as they knew that their countrymen might consider them race traitors.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
That is a strange thing to call Palantir.
Seriously, there might be some illegals where the government is not even aware they exist, but I was persuaded by others here that they might actually be a minority of the illegals. In particular, any illegal who was convicted of a crime will likely have left a paper trail in the court system. Probably most illegals are on facebook, too.
I generally dislike cops going on fishing expeditions. Facial id technology makes it much more feasible to find illegals without violating anyone's rights -- take pictures of people in public, check them against the database, then go after the ones which come up positive.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense
I will grant you that for Good, that argument can be made.
For Pretti, I just don't see it. Shooting someone who was at that time unarmed in the back because you thought they were armed looks bad. Likely there are thousands of gang members doing time for murder or manslaughter for cases which had a better claim to self defense than the Pretti shooters. They certainly had more reasonable doubt because their actions were unlikely to be filmed from multiple angles.
Are you advocating to pardon all of them, or do you advocate that cops should be held to much lower standards ("if the cop plausibly thought he was in danger, that's self defense")?
Anyone who is claiming that as of this moment, the US is a fascist dictatorship is obviously full of shit. I have no idea if the people in the video are making such claims, or if that is a straw man, and refuse to watch video arguments out of principle -- literate people should use text.
The ICE deployment to MN is not in itself a milestone on the path to fascism. Nor is them killing two people in error. The fact that both of them were slandered as domestic terrorists by Trump officials is much more concerning.
If you want to steelman the rise of fascism thesis, you could instead focus on Trump undermining elections, as he did in 2020 when he flat out denied the outcome. If his J6 crowd had been more successful and forced Pence to certify his election based on his alternative electors, do you think Trump would have refused if he had thought he could get away with it?
Likewise, Trump's recent call to nationalize the election seems dangerous. I have never seen Trump being willing to admit defeat in his life. I am certain that an election under his control would find the votes he wants, this time. This is different from Biden or Obama or W, none of whom I could imagine to end the American democracy experiment to stay in power for a few more years. All that is standing between Trump and kinghood is the SCOTUS, and to be fair, that is a substantial check on him. But that is the guardrail of democracy -- if everything was running well, you should not depend on the guardrail.
LLMs are actually great at picking up subtle nuances in the training data which humans would call stereotypes.
For chatbots, the general goal for RLHF is something like "humble, helpful, harmless". Picking a face of the Shoggoth comes with baggage. If I imagine a friendly, qualified operator of some helpline, the stereotype says they are likely a young college-educated woman.
I am sure that if you used RLHF to select a Shoggoth-face which talked like 4chan, you would get very different politics along with it.
This seems utterly pathetic on the part of the AI companies.
I mean, there are things which are outrage bait which need to be fixed, if your LLM happily generates python code which prints a recipe for methamphetamine, insults racial minorities with the right prompt or the like, you want to CYA and claim that you fixed this as soon as you became aware of the issue, even if the fix is just filtering any queries which mention both meth and python.
This however is not outrage bait. Papering over the flaws of your model one by one is utterly pointless.
Suppose I have a colleague who has written a function, and I tell him that actually his function fails for x=-1/3. What he then does is to add the following:
This might be an acceptable short-term stopgap if I had indicated that his function failing for x=-1./3 (and only that value) is a showstopper for me, but in general it is a terrible idea. If his code fails for every x==-1./prime, then his approach will not converge to correct code any time soon, instead, he is simply papering over the specific errors people have found, e.g. cheating to make his code look correct when he knows it is not.
Ideally, AI companies would indicate a minimum of trustworthiness given that they are in a position of power (and possibly going to summon the demon which wipes out mankind). If they are already willing to cheat with this stuff which nobody would care about, what does that promise for the more serious stuff? It is like watching your new chief of police using a length of wire to steal a can of soda from a vending machine.
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With regard to the content of the mail, this is a trick question of a similar category as the question if the pool of the Titanic is full or not. A human who thinks about these will typically think in images rather than words. I think that the Titanic one is a bit more vicious because the behavior of fluids is rarely spelled out by humans, while 'I drove my car through the car wash' should appear in the training data, while seawater flooding the swimming pool of a sinking vessel might not have appeared explicitly at all.
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