quiet_NaN
18d ago
"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".
I was thinking more about people who had already decided to do something which pisses off the CCP, like joining Falun Gong or campaigning for human rights.
Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!
From my understanding, the problem with Chinese students spying is not that they get their hands on highly classified projects. The problem is that they get their hands on a lot of much less sensitive projects which then give China a competitive edge.
It is likely that the CCP is already sponsoring the odd fake dissident, but more for reasons of infiltrating the international dissident community than in the expectation that the US will put them on a highly sensitive project.
But the average Chinese student is not some deep cover super spy, but just some average person who is required to do a bit of snooping on the side. "We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.
quiet_NaN
18d ago
Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.
There are plenty of subfields in STEM where industrial espionage is not a concern. Pure mathematics or theoretical physics might be subject to someone stealing your paper drafts, but not industrial espionage per se. Likewise, civil engineering.
"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP" is not a super-hard concept to grok. Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship (not that any would do so now before being naturalized in the US) on any research projects which the CCP might be interested in.
quiet_NaN
18d ago
Who is Adam Unikowsky and why should anyone trust / care about their explanation / characterizations of a contemporary culture war topic filled with bad and bad-faith explanations / characterizations?
That is a fully general counterargument. Quite frankly, if you do not like to read opinions on culture war topics by people who may in fact not be 100% neutral observers, The Motte might not be for you.
If you bother to click on the substack link, you will find that Unikowsky did for example link the court document detailing the procedure.
Sure, not every claim is backed up by evidence of that level. But if your suspicion is that detainees were generally verbally advised to get their lawyer to file a habeas petition and inform ICE of their intend to file, it is up to you to write or link an effort-post detailing how in the time period in question, tons of immigrants served with AEA 21-B filed a habeas petition, with links to their cases and everything.
From my own priors, I think that the story as presented -- the Trump administration engaging in malicious compliance to get a few more immigrants out of the country before the courts stop them -- would not be very surprising.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
So it seems that the Trump administration has decided that having already proven its worth as a weapon of the Culture War in the deportation process of Hamas apologist Mahmoud Khalil and international Harvard students.
But this time, they will use it for freedom of speech, for US Americans specifically.
[F]oreign officials have taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.
Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States. It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil.
First, let me get out of the way that I like the US conception of free speech, generally, and agree with Yassine Meskhout that deporting even Hamas fanboys is wrong.
Second, I will notice that jurisdiction of speech acts in the internet is hard to define. If I tweet something offensive to country X while physically residing in country Y, then I think that country X generally has the right to coerce the relevant platform to remove that content, and if that fails coerce local ISPs to block that platform. I might or might not agree with their specifics (depending if it is CSAM or someone calling Kim Jong Un fat), but generally every jurisdiction does that. It is also not in dispute that some speech acts by someone in country X will lead to criminal proceedings against them in that country. Furthermore, as far as country X is concerned, it might reasonably care very little from where the offensive message was sent, as long as it was received in country X. If you send a bomb threat to the US, the US will very much not declare your act out of their jurisdiction just because you were not physically in the US when you did it.
As long as you stay out of country X and do not piss them off sufficiently to get extradited, this will not matter in practice. However, if you visit countries after you sent them speech which broke their local laws (e.g. using public social media posts), you should generally not be very surprised if they will judge your speech act by their laws.
Often, there might be higher standards than "the offensive message was receivable from country X". If you deny the Holocaust in Social Media in Korean while in South Korea, and later on travel to Germany, you will likely get away with it, because the impact of Korean tweets in Germany is generally very small. (If someone adds Germany subtitles to your Holocaust-denying TikTok, things might get messier.)
(Lest anyone thinks Germany is a special case, let me assure you that it is not. If you fuck with the Mouse through any speech act which violates their US copyright, or step on Elsevier's toes, you will have a bad time as soon as you set foot in the US.)
More problematic is the case when country X decides to either prosecute someone for a speech act which was done exclusively in country Y or leans on a platform to censor a speech act worldwide. But in the end, social media companies are generally international, and can decide for themselves in which countries they do business based on their bottom line. Nobody is stopping a pro-free-speech US company from telling country X, "fuck you, block us if you want, we are out of here".
With that out of the way, I think like all the Trump visa restrictions, this one is going to be incredibly petty. It will not change how officials will treat US platforms. I also predict that it will be applied more broadly than the stated "foreigner tries to censor US-only speech on US platform".
quiet_NaN
19d ago
when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz
Minor nitpick: the verb to post implies either authorship or perhaps editorial publishing. The appropriate verb for Nate Silver's behavior is to link, or perhaps to tweet about something.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
- Put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan
Let me stop you right there. With the benefit of hindsight, the revival of the Taliban was already a forgone conclusion when GWB invaded Afghanistan. Within the US RoE, there was no way things could have gone differently. The US stayed for two decades -- easily a generation -- and the democratic state collapsed as soon as they left. They could have stayed for another generation and the outcome would have been the same.
(This is not to say that the retreat was well done, but that the alternative -- pouring resources into Afghanistan to keep the Taliban out of power forever -- was not worth it either from a geostrategic or an EA perspective.)
quiet_NaN
20d ago
I would argue that basis of the political system of Rome, the patron-client relationship, was already as corrupt as any mafia by our understanding. Basically, if a rich patron family sponsored a political campaign for the scion of a client family, the expectation certainly was that the scion would use his office to further the interests of his patron. Perhaps not always in the most blatant way possible, but a magistrate who one day decided to make decisions on their merits for the Roman people only would certainly be seen as a disgrace to his family.
This was forever the issue with land reforms: whoever gave land to the masses would by Roman convention become their patron, and thus gain enormous political power.
Now, there is obviously a difference between having a long-standing client family and just buying a consul with cash, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. A platform to stomp out corruption (as we understand it) in Rome would go as well as a platform to abolish the navy in the British Empire.
American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.
Trump II is different from this. Sure, all the anti-immigration stuff is purely ideological, and if you count the personal ego of Trump as part of the ideology, a lot more of his squabbles are also non-corrupt. But all this tariff back-and-forth seems like it was mostly for the purpose of ripping of the stock market, and the airliner thing was on a "we do not even bother to pretend otherwise any more" level.
quiet_NaN
21d ago
-- Has not fathered any children with women who were not his wife at the time.
-- Has not had a divorce with a mother of a child of his before that child turned 16.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
2 . Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
I think that a bisexual woman can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a man, just like a man who has a thing for red-haired women can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a brunette woman.
7 . Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
I would argue that the correct unit to measure student loan debt is "years till payoff". Presumably, in a well-earning profession, you can pay off your student loans in a decade?
8 . 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Why? Most of the women who want to start a family will be closer to your threshold of 30 than 18. Why would you care how many guys she fucked when she was 3/5th of her current age? Why not also care how much Sailor Moon she watched when she was 12?
I mean, if during the last year, she has sucked off twenty random guys in some club bathrooms while drunk, then there is some argument to be made that she is likely not ready for the kind of relationship you have in mind. If the same thing was a decade ago and she had sex with two boyfriends since then, that paints a very different picture as far as her suitability is concerned.
Or is this more of an illegible aesthetic preference for sexual purity? Call me a horny guy, but I would rather settle down with someone after both of us had 20 partners than if we had zero partners.
As a guy, it took about zero willpower to stay under your limit, but I can tell you that if I had gotten the median number of sexual advances a woman will get before turning 30 things would look very differently.
Realistically, your limit of five will not select for women with few sexual partners, it will mostly select for women who are willing to lie about how many partners they had.
Notable criteria I omitted:
- Political affiliation
Realistically, this is a show-stopper. Perhaps it was different three decades ago, but today it is. I would happily stay single for the rest of my life before I would stick my dick into either MAGA or Hamas fans, for example.
- Drug use
This phrase covers a lot of spectrum. Probably 90% of the population are at least occasional drug users. Of course, there is a vast gulf between "not a teetotaler" and "addicted to crack".
- Sex work/Onlyfans
If you are selecting for less than six lifetime sex partners, I do not think that you will have a lot of OF models left in your pool. While I am sure that there is the odd virgin on OF, it does not really strike me as a hobby for the purity-focused religious types.
(OT: If I start a line with 2., the preview will turn that into 1. Do we really need the editor to count for us? Relevant quote: He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.)
quiet_NaN
21d ago
Hot take: this does not really belong in the CW thread because it is not controversial. Nobody seems to be contesting that Trump has done most of the above. His defenders mostly claim that this is normal politician behavior.
Most congress critters are sponsored by big companies in their home state and certainly do their best to help these companies afterwards, sending the gravy train their way etc. Some go beyond that and do a bit of insider trading on the side. Only a few are open about taking money from foreign interests with an implied quid pro quo.
Allow me a metaphor. Except for a few (Bernie Sanders?), every politician farts in the whirlpool. There are certainly quite some who occasionally pee in the whirlpool too. But Donald Trump has just removed his trunks and taken a jumbo-sized shit in the whirlpool.
quiet_NaN
21d ago
The threat is existential.
No, it is not. If the Taliban party had just gotten a majority of the votes in New Mexico, then I might be inclined to agree that your country faces an existential threat. But this does not happen. The only religious nutjobs getting elected to Congress are self-identifying as Christian, and even they do not pose an existential threat.
Sure, given current demographic trends, at some point in the future the non-hispanic whites will be a minority. But this is not the end of the world. I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
Since you beat the Brits, you had perhaps two conflicts which might be called existential: the civil war (in retrospect, the outcome was over-determined, if not in the 1860s, then in the 1900s) and the cold war (which was more of a threat to the world as a whole than to the US specifically).
Anyone who wants to tell you that any current political thing, be it Dobbs, immigration, Trump, Social Justice or whatever poses an existential threat to the US is very likely wrong. (The AI doomers at least have a plausible pathway in mind, though.)
quiet_NaN
22d ago
You are correct 99% of the time. Most of the time, the duty of a soldier is not in doubt, it is obeying the (non-atrocious) orders of the leadership of his country.
Put simply, as long as the President, Congress and the SCOTUS are on the same side, the military will follow their orders, and any attempt at civil war by other parties will go extremely poorly.
However, you could also consider what happens in a constitutional crisis. For example, on J6, Trump was still the commander of the military, and he could have tried to deploy the marines to "stop the steal". If you then rely on the civilian leadership, things would get hairy, because the commander of the US military is the president. However, US soldiers do not swear simply to follow the orders of the US president. Instead, they swear:
I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In a constitutional crisis, the US military is sworn first and foremost to uphold the constitution, and famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says. (Within reason. If five SC justices decided to rule that one of them is in fact legally the president, and ordered the marines to occupy the White House, the military leadership might follow their own interpretation of the constitution instead.)
This "of course the military will follow the civilian leadership", which you take for granted, can be taken for granted in the US (after the civil war, anyhow), but historically seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as far as democratic states are concerned. In Weimar Germany, when the democratic leaders were asking the military to help with militants which attempted a coup in some cities, the reply was "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- we do not shoot our own. Spanish fascism started as a military coup, as did most military dictatorships in the Americas. "Military leadership decides they don't like election results" is a very common failure mode of having a military.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Are you saying that the SJ left has not been very successful with their strategy of going through the channels and enshrining DEI into federal law, and leave the enforcement to the justice system?
There are places where the best way to enact change is to pick up an assault rifle and form a gang. The US is very much not such a place. Instead, you want to cooperate with existing institutions to get the behemoth of the US military on your side.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.
Here, seconded by another gray/blue-leaning Mottizen. I will not pretend that I would not be happy if Trump dropped dead from natural causes, but the erosion of political standards inherent to his assassination would not be to the benefit of anyone who likes peace. (Besides, I think a dead martyr Trump would be a great boon for the MAGA cause, while from what I have seen so far this year, a live Trump who might even insist to run again in 2028 is much more of a mixed blessing.)
That being said, the prime example for the left applauding a political murder is not Trump, it is that UnitedHealthcare CEO. I have to confess that while I am against murder as a policy, especially when it is unlikely to solve the underlying issue, I am also not particularly upset about that one. A drug dealer can at least defend himself by saying that he is simply serving the forces of the market, while someone offering health insurance to employers is serving a twisted parody of a market mandated by US law and kept in place through continuous lobbying efforts. So sure, I am slightly less sympathetic than I am to some homeless person who gets stabbed by a psychotic homeless, or whatever the median sympathy murder is. Mostly, it is a distraction, what is wrong with the US health care system can not be fixed by shooting any number of CEOs.
I will grant you that it is hard to measure the real level of support for that killing by the average person on the street, but left leaning social media generally rejoiced.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Why would the Democrats want to start a civil war? Most of the smarter ones are probably aware that Trump is unlikely to manage to turn the US into a Fourth Reich or Gilead. They can just chill out till the mid-terms and hope that by then, the repercussions of Trump's tariffs will have hit the median voter. Nor will Trump manage to root out wokeness in his term. Sure, things are unfortunate, but not unfortunate enough to defect against the US political system which has served them well for decades.
The only way in which right-wing militias would matter is if every branch of the US military decided to sit out an open conflict. I do not see that happening.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
There is only one relevant military power in the US, which is the US military.
While a majority of the ranks might support Trump, most of them likely do not believe that the 2020 was stolen and would be willing to shoot fellow citizens to right that wrong. I also think that most officers will support the constitution as interpreted by the SCOTUS, a sentiment which will also have some popularity with the enlisted men and women.
The right-wing militias are obviously different, but for the most part they are just cosplaying. They might have a lot of small arms, but when faced with tanks they would fare very poorly. A proper civil war requires somewhat like parity in weapons, either because the domestic stockpile is split between the factions or because foreign powers are providing arms.
The worst outcome I can see for the US would be something like the Troubles. Now, the Troubles were bad, but they were very far removed from being a full civil war. There is a difference between 3500 people killed and more than 650k people killed (like in Syria).
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Now, I hate the NYT as much as anyone, but the first paragraph after your no way out quote says:
The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.
This is the real threat, not the squabbling over federal funds. Harvard might swim in cash, but they also live of their ability to draw in the best students from half the world. For billions of people worldwide, the answer to the question "Where would you study if you were super-smart and wanted to win a Nobel?" is "Ivy league, or a few prestigious state-run universities in the US". In the future, the answer for all but 340M (plus Canadians, perhaps?) will change to "... except Harvard, which does not take international students."
My understanding of the US private universities is that their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend. It is a symbiotic relationship: the rich student pays for both of them getting a prestigious, excellent education, and the brilliant student makes sure that the prestige of the university is maintained.
About 27% of Harvard's students are international (a lower number than I would have expected). I think that the "rich and smart" internationals can be replaced without too much trouble, you would not have to lower standards very much to find still very smart Americans willing to pay for the privilege of studying at Harvard. I did not find what fraction of students is studying for free at Harvard, never mind how many of them are internationals, but I suspect that the overall fraction of students on a stipend is small, and that a significant fraction of them are internationals. Replacing these with US nationals will likely hurt.
Also, there are cascading effects. If you are a brilliant young American, would you rather go to a university where you can meet the best minds of your generation (or so they would claim), or one where you can only meet the best US minds of your generation who do not care about that very fact?
The obvious reaction (if the courts uphold Trump's decision) for Harvard would be to announce them opening a branch in Canada, but that is not easily done.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Okay, I will go first. WP:
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he was the only Iranian to sit on the Shura, or guiding council, of Hezbollah. According to The Guardian, he was most likely a critical figure in coordinating Iran's relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad government of Syria.
Are you arguing that the main target was actually just a foot soldier, or a civilian, or that Hezbollah had not been used to prop up the Assad regime?
Given that eight times more people were killed in the Israeli airstrike than in the shooting, you don't even have to find a source claiming that one of the people shot was the main military liaison between the US and Israel. If the victims were in charge of procuring small arms from the US and the shooter had picked them for that reason, I would concede that this was purposeful violence.
(All of this is discounting that there is an obvious difference between the military leadership in autocratic countries and stable democracies. In autocratic countries, a powerful general is a coup risk, so you want someone with a close personal relationship to the leader, think Crusader Kings. In a stable democracy at peace, there is a functionally unlimited supply of loyal and competent military leaders. If Iran managed to blow up the top ten military leaders of the US, this would not hamper the effectiveness of the US military very much.)
quiet_NaN
24d ago
I will go out on a limb and say that I do not consider the Israeli airstrike against an Iranian general in Damascus all that bad.
Attacking an embassy is both an act of war against the host country and the country running the embassy.
Killing a general, his staff, and civilian Iranian embassy employees alongside two Syrian civilians (a mother and her child) is not great, but it is pretty tame both in the context of the Syrian civil war and compared to what Israel considers acceptable civilian casualties when taking out Hamas leaders in Gaza.
There is also a point to be made that this probably was a causal factor in the collapse of the Assad regime which happened in the same year, ending (hopefully) a decades long civil war.
Now, if you show me that the two Israelis which were killed were instrumental in the Israeli military efforts, perhaps tasked with sourcing US weapons, and the attacker picked them for that reason, then I will grudgingly grant you that they would have been acceptable targets from Iran's point of view.
But based on what I heard, some dude just shot two random embassy employees because he was unhappy with Israel.
quiet_NaN
26d ago
This. Our current understanding of quantum physics is ultimately called the standard model of particle physics. This theory basically got its finishing touches mid-1970. Since then, we have found a few missing pieces of the puzzle predicted by the SM, such as the top quark or the Higgs.
Besides the open questions which were apparent ca. 1975 (Can we unify the strong and electroweak interaction? How the fuck should gravity fit into all of that?), we have found a few more puzzles (e.g. so at least some neutrinos have mass, dark matter seems to be implied by astronomical observations).
These open problems have been attracting theoretical physicists -- and I have no reason to believe that the current top theoreticians are simply less smart than Einstein or Dirac. So far, we have not made enough progress that one could confidently predict a timeline. If we do not get an AI-powered singularity, it seems certainly possible that by 2125, the progress we will have made is that our best candidate from string theory will be somewhat less ruled out by the SM.
quiet_NaN
26d ago
Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.
The pathway to discovery which we took involved noticing that mold was stopping the growth of cultivated bacteria. To take that pathway, you require the cultivation of individual bacteria colonies. This is not trivial, because in nature everything is full of all kinds of spores, and you basically need a theory of germs. Simply, the discovery "mold kills bacteria in a petri dish" requires "one can grow bacteria in a petri dish". Basically, it took Pasteur (ca 1859) to discover the latter fact, before him people generally thought that bacteria would form spontaneously. Fleming discovered his ruined cultures in 1928, and then it took another 15 years or so to really get the production up. I guess I half-agree with your assessment, in that I think there was probably 50 years worth of slack, but I don't think it was 100 years, and certainly not 2000 years as the OP suggested.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
I think that in this particular instance, it is simply that the rules as written are bad. If you want to incentivize people avoiding single-use bags, then the following should work out fine:
If you don't require any single use bags, you will get a flat discount for your purchase.
If you don't have enough reusable bags, then we will happily sell you another reusable bag if you want to take advantage of the discount.
As we also want people to shop in bulk, we will increase the reusable-bag discount based on the sticker price (using a strictly monotonic function between sticker price and discounted price, e.g. 1% off per ten dollars sticker price, up to 10%).
The cashier would simply have a line item "all-reusable discount", and the computer would calculate the discount. Sure, you could still have discussions about what counts as a "reusable bag". Is any bag which was not provided by the store for free ok? What if someone buys a roll of garbage bags and then proceeds to use them to transport the groceries? But you would at least no longer be vulnerable to the exploit you describe.
Meanwhile in Germany, the thin plastic bags for loose fruits and vegetables are free, but every other bag will cost you. Nor will most supermarkets sell you shitty single-use plastic bags. Your options are to either spend half a Euro on a shitty paper bag which will probably fail if you fill it up, or pay a Euro (or two?) for a robust reusable plastic bag. I own perhaps eight of the latter and they can be reused for dozens of shopping trips easily.
It looks like we both agree that if Unikowsky had posted his article directly on the motte under a new user account, that would have been fine.
What we disagree on is how much introduction should be required when a motte user quotes a source. My position is that as I am already reading takes from random persons on the internet, if a source is not contextualized (or I do not trust the poster's contextualization of the source), I will simply treat it with the same level of skepticism I would have for a new motte poster.
Total agreement here. They are the worst.
(Second worst are links directly to twitter threads, which depending on how Musk is feeling might only show me the first tweet and tell me to create an account.)
I browsed a bit through the substack, and it seems that at least 50% of the articles are Trump/CW related (and generally Democrat-leaning), 10% are about LLMs in judicial processes, with some other legal topics being sprinkled in here and there. The main difference is that while @sockpuppet2 with his Mecken quote points out that the deportees deserve due process even if they are as guilty as sin, the substack focuses more on the fact that many of them might not actually be Tren de Aragua, but simply people with unrelated tattoos.
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