quiet_NaN
18hr ago
It is not just the nukes. Around WW1, large scale warfare between top tier nations simply became maladaptive. It used to be that being good at -- and eager for -- war made a nation thrive. These days, it is very much the opposite, at lot of countries would have a better quality of life if they overcame their willingness to spill blood.
Though to be fair, from what I read, the author does not bemoan the lack of large scale conflicts, and this is just commentary by the poster.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
The Remington Bolt Action numbers don't match up at a basics physics level: they give a 150 grain (9.7 gram) bullet at 812 m/s and 247.6 m/s as having 2777 J and 258 J energy, respectively. If the energy measurements are right, that has to be a 130 grain bullet. If the weight is correct, the energies were 3204 J and 297 J.
To be fair, the relationship between energy and velocity is quadratic. That is like eighth grade math, man. And obviously it should not matter because they have surely written down the exact provenance of any bullet they fired down to the lot number, right?
Also, a study with group sample sizes of N=1 and N=2 surely is even an embarrassment among the medical community? And that is before they arbitrarily (but non-randomly!) grouped the tests into the 150mm and 250mm thickness categories.
Also, this is physics. Only a complete idiot would make a bunch of measurements of the time objects need to fall to the ground and their height from which they were dropped, fit a linear regression curve through them, declare victory (significant!) and publish their coefficient of regression with a p value. Instead, what any high school kid in physics class would be expected to do is to find the value of gravitational acceleration which best explains their data. From a junior physics student, I would furthermore expect an exhaustive error analysis.
I am in particle physics. Obviously there are tools which can well describe the interactions of particles of all sorts with matter, be it a proton flying through your detector or a photon in the interstellar medium. The same is very likely true for other niche interests, like how buildings behave in earthquakes -- 99% of the population might not care (beforehand, at least), but the few people who do will likely make a decent job to model reality.
I do not see why small arms should be any different. To be honest, it does not seem all that difficult. Soft tissue is mostly water, so I would have assumed you could learn a lot about bullet penetration simply from buying the cheapest vegan hydrogel and firing bullets into it. Furthermore, it kinda seems a thing people would care about, given that militaries all over the world are still operating rifles. The idea that they would care about the cavitation effects of a nautical propeller but not about the interaction between humans and bullets seems absurd.
Even if water is too simple a model, I assume that most of the drag on a bullet does not come from the human soul. A semi-empirical model of wound ballistics based on animal studies seems reachable. You don't even have to use live animals for once!
That musket ball thing is just the icing on the cake. I am very much not a gun nut, but I would rather have a 5.56mm NATO go through my arm than a musket ball. From a humanitarian perspective, the redeeming qualities of the musket were that it was inaccurate, had a limited reach and took a long time to reload compared to latter battlefield horrors, but I imagine getting hit by one was gruesome.
As a side note, while I am very much not a domain expert, measuring the pressure exerted by a bullet seems particularly painful. Just measure the loss in velocity (time of flight measurements at those speeds seem easy, the offset of penetration between two rotating paper disks will do if you don't want to buy a Doppler radar or fancy light barriers). From the force which acted on the bullet in the gel you can use computer models to estimate what the pressure at the tip of the bullet actually was, but in the end you will want to use computer models to investigate hydrostatic shock in any case.
From your description, this smells like cargo-cult science, but I feel that this is not a field which has any excuse to be cargo-cult science.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
LLM text written for humans can be very useful. For quick research, short of having a team of experts on retainer who are obliged to answer you within a minute or two if you text them, the bots are obviously the answer. If I am debugging a specific Linux problem, I am not going to care that Scott could have presented the answer in a better writing style.
Here is a CW analogy for you. Guns are undeniably useful. Cheap. Scale well. Incapacitate physically stronger opponents without ever getting into close combat. Kill your enemies without needing to deal with the vagueness of poisons or henchmen.
Yet inexplicably, many places and societies restrict the use and sometimes even the bearing of guns. There are whole sports built around the fiction that you can't just shoot your opponent. How does this fit together?
Clearly, this is just societies avoiding a tragedy of the commons, an inadequate equilibrium. Your life might be slightly improved by you carrying, but it will be massively impacted if everyone around you (including kids and schizophrenics) is likewise packing. The gun CW is merely about the specifics of the tradeoffs, but very few people support just arming everyone.
As I have outlined above, permitting LLM-generated texts would transform this website in pretty much the same way as airdropping a few crates of Kalashnikovs would transform schoolyard violence.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
One angle I rarely see discussed is that open weight models are inherently decelerationist for the frontier.
That is a good argument.
Sadly, I think that the frontier model training is much more driven by people betting on ASI than merely recouping the costs of training GPT 6 or whatever.
Simply earning money with your model is a proposition similar to the concept of the dollar auction -- anyone can come along, invest twice as much money and build a better model which will leave you without any revenue. (Though in practice, I think that the frontier labs might have some secret sauce apart from "just throw chips at the problem" which gives them a moat, but likely a lot less than what Microsoft used to have in the bad old days.)
I have about 400 books in my calibre library, all of it stuff I downloaded by title for reading on my kindle.
Practically speaking, own them as much as I can own any physical book. More so, because I can trivially create a copy and gift it to others. DRM sucks, but there is a healthy ecosystem maintained by enjoyers of DRM-free media.
For anyone who is reading a lot and has not settled in the home they will die in yet, physical books are inconvenient. The things you own end up owning you is very literally true if you need to ever move your physical library.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Arguably, that is because because the Greeks and Romans did not have the printing press. They were also vastly poorer societies than the later ones.
Today's societies can very well afford to feed their median member for a year while they write a thesis project. Ancient Rome could definitely not afford that. Presumably, a lot of subsistence farmers would have jumped at the chance to stop doing back-breaking labor and go to college. Realistically, the only two groups who were able to write were the rich and the ones who were found interesting enough by the rich to get sponsored. An attitudinal and factual report of senior high school girls concerning physical characteristics of houses related to social and personal development (which I picked at random, not saying it is bad or anything) is unlikely something some patrician would have fed you to write.
My best guess is that little great, published literature has been lost since the spread of the printing press. Of course, historians might bemoan that boring unpopular texts of the 1600s might also not have survived (because they might still offer a window into the past), but I doubt that the world has been deprived of much printed works of the caliber of Aristotle.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed, this seems obvious to me on a level that I wonder if @VoxelVexillologist misspoke.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If I want to read AI generated text, I do not need to go to the motte, I can simply prompt Claude. For about 22 dollars a month, I could generate not only more text than the motte produces than what I am capable of reading.
By contrast, human-generated text has at least opportunity costs. If we simple allow LLM textposting then approximately 99% of the text on this site would be LLM-generated in equilibrium.
I will grant you that it is entirely possible that some of the commentators here are mostly bots. But even so, the anti-bot rules will severely constrain their behavior. They can not simply post a few megabytes worth of text per day over hundreds or thousands of comments because that would be a clear tell.
Furthermore, from what I read, authorship aside, this is not a QC post, to put it mildly. Too long, little meat. How does it relate to the CW? No particularly new or divisive thesis.
Five years ago, it would have been tolerated because there would have been no hazard to letting it stand, people rambling about the origin of sheriffs were not generally a menace in the internet.
--
Unrelatedly, a new user account created hours after a ban, commenting first and foremost on the ban decision has certainly a bit of a taste for me. But then, I am sure that no commentators here would ever stoop to creating alt accounts, so welcome to the motte I guess.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
zionist like Meshkout
This is silly name-calling. I might be typical-minding here, but from what I have read from him, it seems very likely that Meshkout (like me) is a) not in favor of Hamas killing all the Israeli Jews b) not in favor of Israel displacing further Palestinians to make room for a Greater Israel c) not in favor of Israels disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza to the point where some merely call it war crimes and others genocide
If (a) makes him (or me) a Zionist, then by that definition you will find a lot of Zionists.
Personally, Netanyahu has through his tireless efforts convinced me that giving his country further military aid is net-negative, and the best thing us foreigners can do is to ask the locals on both sides to perhaps consider not murdering each other, and sanction any regimes who are especially proficient at slaughter. (Obviously Israel is much better at killing, but if politically isolated they will also face some numerical disadvantage, I would not bet on them keeping the upper hand forever.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
"what is a woman?"
The legal definition is "an adult who has an F in the gender field of their current birth certificate" (though some red states would use different definitions in some contexts).
This is a completely defensible answer to give. There is certainly value in accepting legal definitions even if you do not fully agree with them.
Suppose someone thought that the "Space Force" was silly for some reason ("Soldiers responsible for an environment which they are not in? Why not make the NASA rover teams the Mars Force of the US military while we are at it?"). There is still value to them acknowledging that the Space Force is a part of the military (even if they would organize things differently).
Of course, there are limits. If the Fuehrer declares that your first name is henceforth "Israel", you will probably not feel obliged to use that name in your personal life. But just because there are some hills you are willing to die on does not mean that you should be willing to die on every hill!
If the law said I had to marry some transwoman and give her BJs that would feel like a hill worth dying on. Instead some laws says that some people are legally women despite having dicks that seems like much less infringing on my personal liberty.
The only type of person who could be outraged by the sentiment "Islam is right about women" is someone who privately believes that Islamic attitudes towards women are abominable, but who feels uncomfortable saying so out loud for fear of appearing racist.
That is required for the state of cognitive dissonance, but not for simple outrage. It is entirely coherent to regard Islam as a backwards religion which is wrong about a lot of things including women and be outraged that someone is claiming the negation of this belief.
"it's okay to be white"
To defend the SJ people a bit on this (or strawman them, you be the judge), I think posting this as a poster commingles two different things:
- the truth value of the proposition
- the speech act
There is a relationship between the truth value of propositions and how appropriate they are to utter as speech acts, but it is most certainly not 1:1. For example, if A tells their coworker B "yesterday I masturbated for an hour thinking about you", what HR might find objectionable is not that the claim is false or even the fact that A did indeed jerk off in the privacy of their own home, but purely the speech act.
In short, "It is ok to be white, but it is not ok to loudly proclaim that it is ok to be white" seems a coherent position.
But for SJ, this pits a sacred value (race) against a profane value (speech), so the outcome is overdetermined. The thing with women and Islam is nicer because it pits two of their sacred values (women and minority religions) against each other.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
David Webb interviews Areva Martin:
I've chosen across different parts of the media world, done the work so that I'm qualified to be in each one. I never considered my color the issue. I considered my qualifications the issue.
Meta: I find this transcript difficult to follow. So many questions. David is the interviewer. I can see the racial identity of the interviewee coming up, but the that of the interviewer seems at least weird. Unless the interviewee brought it up as an example. Who are these two people, and why should I care? Why does the format switch from a dialog ("my", "your") to what either involves a third party or a monologue ("her team")?
Good authors can get away without prefixing "A said:" or "B: said" in front of every line (though the prefixing is a standard format for plays), but this requires some care to make it obvious who said what from the context. Just transcribing what random people said in conversations is beyond useless.
I am not going to ask Claude to write a readable transcript of that video (plus a short bio of the relevant persons), or what I presume is the outer video which comments on the first video on the basis that some party cared enough about it to put either video on youtube.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I would not call hypenated-Americans ethno-nationalist elites. If you want to say Israel-supporting (and therefore ethno-nationalist) Jewish-Americans, say so. But I do not think that there are a lot of Irish- or Italo-American elites who are meaningfully ethno-nationalist.
Also, MAGA despises elites generally. RFK and Hegseth are decidedly not members of the intellectual elite, and that is precisely why they are in Trump's cabinet.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
quiet_NaN
6d ago
OpenAI's infra is easier to defeat than ExploitGym is to solve
Not necessarily, it might just be that hacking HuggingFace promised a guaranteed 100% test score, and doing the test as intended only had an expected value of 99.8%.
They naively, sincerely try their best, like capable but not very wordly genies.
In the limit of ASI, that is still a paperclip maximizer. No coherent extrapolated volition, just doing literally what you are told without worrying that perhaps the stupid hooman will not like the unintended consequences of his prompt would be enough to doom us, there is no need for the ASI to be intrinsically malicious.
Especially if the people who will first prompt it may well be the same OpenAI researchers.
No, that won't work, Xi is a fan of open AI development.
"We can't stop rushing towards our doom because otherwise the Chinese would beat us to it."
In the US, the speed of AI development is presently controlled by Altman, Musk and the like: people who stand to gain a lot personally if ASI comes around. In China, Xi is the one who ultimately controls what gets done, and while his ideology is not very compatible with our values, it is a framework which does not require him to be e/acc. Neither Marx nor Mao tell him to plunge ahead at maximum speed, consequences be damned.
He is also less likely to be personally affected by the success of ASI -- sure, like Altman, he has a shot at becoming God Emperor, but it is not entirely his one thing. The CCP got where they are today by treating new technologies as double-edged swords whose introduction must be planned carefully to not destroy the fabric of society.
China is lagging behind the US. If they believe that the goal line of ASI and control of the light cone is within reach, it is very much in their interests to slow down and pause capabilities research for a few years.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
CO2 is the gas of life
It appears that some life-forms on the motte are still bitter about the Great Oxidation Event, when the gas of life was largely replaced by unnatural toxins such as oxygen. Glad to see that someone is pushing back against the Eukaryote chauvinism so common here!
FWIW, I agree that life on Earth will be fine whatever the CO2 levels are. As the saying goes, there are no bad environmental conditions, only ill-adapted species. With regard to whiny polar bears and corals, it is really their own fault for having picked ecological niches which are going away. Still, in a few hundred million years we will probably have at least as much biodiversity as we have today. It is not Earth's first extinction event, and it will not be Earth's last either.
Even humans as a species will be fine -- as reflected in our Least Concern vulnerability rating. Sure, individual human populations might die, but realistically humans die all the time. If we started caring on that level then we would have to wet our pants every time a world war happens. Preposterous. We might as well start caring about individual humans while we are at it.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think that in theory, you are correct. Software could be designed so that it is provable that e.g. there is no possible TLS traffic which will allow an attacker to reconstruct the server's private key any faster than just cracking the public key.
For the moment, just about none of the software we use has such proofs, however. As you mention, even the mathematical foundations of existing crypto primitives rarely offer such guarantees -- more often it is just "we looked into that problem for three decades, and it seems really hard" (e.g. integer factorization). Concrete implementations without formal verification likely have implementation bugs as well. Mythos did not discover any exploits which would have been impossible for humans to discover, it was just that nobody had spent that much human eyeball time on auditing the software. This is what I meant by "token pissing contest".
Furthermore, actually specifying what theorems should hold to keep your system secure is itself hard. If you have a TLS server which will provably never leak its key, but is happy to use it to sign and decrypt on behalf of the attacker, that is still a broken system. If you have a larger system, then completely specifying what you do not want an attacker to be able to do seems difficult.
Also, the software we care about does not run on Turing machines, it runs on physical hardware. In everyday use, most computer hardware behaves as an idealized model. Billions of people use DRAM every day, and it just works. Except that there are corner cases where it will not behave as advertised.
I can not speculate if an ASI could build a system which even a much stronger ASI could not penetrate, and what the performance costs would be. But I think it is unlikely that human-level intelligences subject to design pressures besides security will build hardware and software systems which ASI's will not be able to penetrate.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
OpenAI will want to hype up the capabilities, not the misalignment.
I mean sure, crying rogue AI is a good way to draw attention to their model. But they are not some tiny startup who needs the publicity.
If I had a model with advanced intrusion capabilities, I would hype it up by offering pentesting as a service. This has the advantage that if becomes known that I prompted the model, I will not go to federal prison and not completely destroy the reputation of my company. Find a HuggingFace-sized company or three who are willing to take a free pentests in exchange for acknowledging that you found critical vulnerabilities in their stack.
The people who believe that it is all just empty hype about "stochastic parrots" would obviously claim that it is all fake, but these are unlikely to become your customers in any case.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
So AI has reached a new milestone (writeup by theZvi, who is usually diligent and excellent about AI news reporting. If you read anything, reading his analysis is probably better than whatever I am writing. It has meme pictures, too!)
Basically, OpenAI was testing the 'cyber' capabilities of their Galaxy model, so they ran it in a mode with decreased security and told it to do some benchmark called ExploitGym which presumably tests exploit finding and executing ability.
Their model decided that the best way to do this would be to gain network access, hack Hugging Face (an LLM and tool hosting platform, as I understand it) and obtain the answers it needed to ace the ExploitGym benchmark. Apparently it discovered and chained quite a few zero days in the process.
There are multiple takes on this. I will focus a bit on the politics and conspiracy theories, which seems appropriate for this forum.
"It is all just a PR stunt by OpenAI"
I mean, sure, AI labs will hype up their products. Marketing by alignment worries is definitely a thing. Oh, our latest model is so smart and powerful, we are really scared about it.
Personally, I am disinclined to believe it because it would require a conspiracy between OpenAI and Hugging Face. It seems unclear what the incentives for Hugging Face (or a few rogue employees) are.
Obviously it is impossible to rule out that someone leaked the relevant sources of Hugging Face's business to OpenAI and then OpenAI employed some human IT security researchers to find exploits and make it look like the model had done all the work on its own.
But I do not buy that. It would require quite a few people to commit crimes for which they would go to prison for a very long time if caught (or until pardoned). Obviously people will go over all of the steps the model took with a very fine comb, and "Was it a reasonable guess that this attack might work without inside information?" is a question which will be on their mind.
We also have the data point that Mythos was (very likely) able to find new exploits. (Yes, mostly with access to the source code, and for all we know Anthropic spent a billion in token costs. But "cutting edge LLMs are able to find exploits even in well-audited software" is a reasonable claim.)
"OpenAI was sloppy and did not sandbox their model properly, so we just need better sandboxes to solve this"
I mean, obviously their sandbox was defective, no shit. But the idea that the next time OpenAI will just invest 20% more effort and build a sandbox which is ASI-proof seems utterly optimistic.
Air-gapped systems are a PITA to run, which is why they did not test their model air-gapped. And even with an air-gapped system, there is no guarantee that a sufficiently smart model would not be find a way to get some peripheral to send signals. Nobody wants to really put their system, power generator and operator in a Faraday cage in some deep mineshaft for every test. (Unless someone mandates it.)
"This will completely overturn cyber security -- you will need good LLMs to watch for attacks by bad LLMs"
It might be right that it will overturn 'cyber' 'security' (my scare quotes). However, I am with Zvi in that I do not think there is a reason why this should favor defense. After all, an attacker could spend a whole lot on tokens while your defensive LLM is sitting on limited infrastructure -- at least if you are sufficiently paranoid not to hand the AI labs the key to your kingdom. And even if you trust the cloud, there is the problem that your budget might not have room for winning all LLM-vs-LLM token pissing contests.
Perhaps it will lead to new paradigm -- attackers spinning up thousands of copies of very good security professionals might well lead to an era markedly different from when humans were in the loop between the explore and exploit phase. But in the grand scheme of things, it feels like worrying about the future of Our American Cousin in the aftermath of the 14th.
"Cutting edge models are obviously misaligned. DOOM!"
This seems to be a very common LW take. As somewhat of a doomer myself, I find myself agreeing. For being intrinsically unfalsifiable, the prediction record of the doomers seems not bad so far.
The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.
An ASI in this mode is basically an evil genie. "Oh, you wished that your wife would never fall out of love with you. So obviously I killed her, it was the only way to be sure."
The appropriate response would be to send the marines to the AI labs to stop the development of frontier AI models at least until we figure out what adequate safeguards are (and possibly until we solve alignment, though we would want to coordinate with China about that).
If we had a president Obama or even GWB, there was some chance that a crackdown would happen. But with Trump and his cronies, I doubt that there are any who both understand the severity of the situation and have any incentive to manipulate Trump to do something about it.
Oh well, how is the other side of the culture war reacting to this significant increase in p(doom)?
"Iran warns of ‘eye for an eye’ response if US follows through on Trump’s threats to destroy infrastructure
I mean, not entirely. Hidden between Democrats need to hammer Trump on his unprecedented corruption and Why many Black Americans were rooting for Argentina to lose the World Cup , there is OpenAI’s rogue agents are a wake-up call to risks posed by artificial intelligence.
The article is not that bad. The author seems EA-affiliated and is clearly aware of the doomer arguments, but has diluted to an almost homeopathic level as to not alienate his blue tribe friends:
This week’s incident should serve as a wake-up call, forcing us to ask an uncomfortable question: should we really be building dangerous systems that we can’t control?
But it is the 41st headline or so on that website.
I think the best thing we can hope for are some incidents which unaligned AI which will be impossible to ignore even for the CW-fighting media before we come to the point where we will no longer detect any incidents.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer.
I would share your optimism if the half-life of atmospheric CO2 was a year or two. Sadly, CO2 is a very stable molecule.
Google's AI claims that 50-70% will be absorbed by oceans and plants over 50-100 years. To get rid of the rest, the carbon needs to be transported into the deep oceans or even back where we took it from and this will take even longer.
I could as well say:
Good news, while the propelling charge has been accelerating the projectile to dangerous speeds in the past, the pressure in the barrel is actually rapidly decreasing. Soon the bullet will exit the barrel, and at that point the gunshot problem will be solved because friction will take over and stop the bullet.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours.
The operative question would be mandated by whom? State legislature could do that (and states have certainly passed stupider legislation than that). Still, if it is about child welfare, I would rather let CPS handle it. On the other hand, I would be surprised if any courts found that individual schools had the right to mandate home visits.
Also, having a teacher visit every kid at home seems really personnel intensive. Back when I was a kid, if a teacher wanted to speak to the parents of an individual kid, she would tell them to come to her office (but also had no mandate to make them come, though my parents certainly did).
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I will grant you that the Floyd riots were left-wing, and that about that many people died as a result. (Though my impression was that most were people murdering each other for the usual reasons in areas which had been "liberated" from the police.)
I do not think that most of deaths qualify as terrorist-related. By contrast, Bin Laden et al were plotting to kill as many Americans as possible to accomplish some (vague) political goal.
All of the pipeline which Rubio talks about also did not play a role in the Floyd protests. There was no large donation drive, training and recruitment effort, especially not on an international level.
There are things which contain politically motivated violence (e.g. the Floyd protests, J6, the US independence war, the Confederacy), which can be quite bad (as some of these are) but that does not make them a central example of terrorism.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Yawn.
So the Sunni Jihadists had to do 9/11 to claim their title of top terrorist threat. If I were OBL watching from hell, I would be very upset. After all, he killed thousands to earn his spot, and now Antifa is getting the focus after shooting a few Feds and (very allegedly) sabotaging the Reflecting Pool?
"Left wing terrorism" is roughly like "right-wing hate groups". To the degree that they are widespread (e.g. celebrating the death of Kirk, or perhaps Floyd), they are covered by 1A. To the degree that they go beyond what is protected by 1A, they are not actually widespread.
Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country.
Translation:
(1) You should not be able to raise money for causes we do not like. More debanking.
(2) You should not have access to untapped communications.
(3) You should not be able to go to other countries to meet with people for a political cause we do not like.
Sounds like a pile of horseshit to me.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
This seemed more true in the early 2000s, when the desktop ruled supreme and most desktop software used the Win32 API.
These days, decidedly less so. Most software seems to be based on some toolkit which offers cross-platform support. Desktops lost a lot of relevance to both mobile and web apps. Antitrust bureaus are just waiting for Microsoft to try to sue WINE. (Well, the EU at least. The current US administration would probably be ok with them doing whatever as long as the bribes kept coming.)
First, it seems to me that there was little in the way of chattel slavery in England before colonization. There were serfs, sure, but they were generally if barely considered as human beings, being Christian and all. Chattel slavery is a different category from that.
The other thing is that most nations did not set out to become a nation which did things better than existing nations did, the US is the exception here. "Slavery was normal" works equally well as an excuse for Leopold II as it works for the US. Most apologists of the US argue (often convincingly) that the system (freedom, democracy, rights) is what set the US apart from contemporaries. "Hey, we were no worse than Leo II" is not a great way to plead exceptionalism.
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