BigObjectPermanenceShill
No bio...
User ID: 4286
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
Oh, Trump has fired plenty of competent people and replaced them with the likes of Kash Patel. But that doesn't much help against asymmetric harassment of commercial ships, which makes passage unsafe. This kind of finegrained large area policing without boots of the ground is a whole dimension of capability the US hasn't been building, because it's a somewhat absurd capability which would not be of help against any realistic threat to the US.
The US has largely lost its capability for WWII-level minesweeping too. On the other hand, the US has proven to be excellent at killing enemy leadership. A shame that this power also doesn't stop an IRGC dude in the general vicinity of the Strait from launching a drone from some foxhole here and there, and is the reason he's doing this in the first place.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
Iran’s negotiators believe Trump is a liar who can’t be negotiated with which is why they were… negotiating with him?
Well, they reportedly walked out in Islamabad, and they're saying they aren't interested in more bullshit.
What are they to do? Just maintain radio silence because Trump is fundamentally untrustworthy? You're grasping at straws. They are simply open to communication. Maybe they are waiting that you guys have a coup and surrender. Would make a lot of sense if Trump was pacified somehow by the cooler heads.
And he’s postponing Bridge and Power Plant Day.
The reason he's postponing is that they are not surrendering, and they are not surrendering not because they still don't get that you can bomb them, but precisely because they do not consider him trustworthy, ie do not expect any viable terms of surrender to be honored (eg, among all else, they want to maintain their capability to use drones and missiles for deterrence, which the US and Israel can proceed to attack at any time). Until this changes, your hope for "a faction" amounts to hope that cretins and/or open traitors somehow prevail against rational actors who operate based on very recent and very raw evidence.
if you want to argue that the Iranian regime is more reliable than Trump I’ll still call that TDS.
You can call it what you want, but I find it obvious that Iranians look and act like educated white professionals, whereas Trump has the credibility of a fent junkie, appoints inept alcoholics to positions of power, and seriously takes the counsel of Laura Loomer and FOX News. It is possible to negotiate with Iranians like with dignitaries of any normal Western nation, but it is not possible to "negotiate" with Trump unless you have some blunt coercive instrument on the table, such as a nuke or a gun to the stock market's temple, and even then he can convince himself it's a bluff. We have seen this in October, with China and rare earths.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
America eliminates the artificially cheap source of oil China was using to industrialize at our expense. America eliminates a major provider of arms to Russia.
This is getting sad.
Russian drones are made in Russia (with Chinese components). Modern Gerans have little in common with Shahed-136, Iran provided the initial IP, not current supply. You're literally just regurgitating propaganda headlines, in this case "primitive Russians can't make drones and depend on Iranian industry".
And what "at our expense"? You mean at the expense of sanctions you put on Iranian oil, making China the buyer of last resort?
The return on investment here is immeasurable. It almost can’t be measured in money because it is the thing on which money itself has value. America will be in the most dominant global position it has ever been, a new apogee of power.
Very well, let us see.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
People on Twitter might treat Trump like a liar who can’t be trusted. Interestingly this perspective is not shared by e.g., Iranian negotiators
However, Araghchi and Ghalibaf do routinely post on Twitter to the effect that he's a liar and can't be trusted. And given that they did not reopen the strait, nor surrender, after the "civilization will die" threat, and instead issued a pretty ludicrous list of demands (and we know now they did issue that list, since they refused to open the Strait until terms like Lebanon were honored, for one thing), I'd say they believe he's a liar who can't be trusted. So what are you talking about?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
8d ago
You sure could nuke them. In fact, as a non-Iranian, I wouldn't mind seeing this. It is a very flashy way to admit (an unnecessary) conventional defeat and speed up nuclear proliferation and the collapse of your world-system.
The problem is that Trump, for all his faults, doesn't really want to nuke anyone. And even if he could credibly threaten to nuke – the current Iranian leader had barely survived an attack that had wiped out his family. He's well aware the US and Israel have the means to kill with impunity. Do you seriously think more naked intimidation will work? Do you have no theory of mind for men?
In the middle of the war he secured an alliance with Indonesia. America now controls Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan and is in the process of controlling Hormuz. The world’s great supply chain chokepoints.
Oh, in the middle of the war. Way to undermine your "smart geopolitically sophisticated Trump voter" posture.
First, this is not an "alliance" but a defense agreement. Read the terms. Indonesia gains a capability boost. You get… what? For example, you don't get an overflight permit:
RRI.CO.ID, Jakarta - Indonesian Ministry of Defense confirmed that U.S. aircraft overflight permits are not part of the newly signed Major Defense Cooperation Partnership (MDCP) between Indonesia and the United States. Officials stressed that sovereignty remains the government’s priority.
The Ministry's Defense Information Bureau Head Brig. Gen. Rico Ricardo Sirait said that the agreement does not include provisions for U.S. aircraft to fly over Indonesian airspace. “The MDCP does not cover overflight clearances,” he said on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, as quoted by Antara.
Rico emphasized that any future decision on airspace access will be guided by sovereignty, national interests, and compliance with Indonesian and international law. “All cooperation must deliver tangible benefits for Indonesia without compromising sovereignty or independent foreign policy,” he said.
He added that the MDCP offers opportunities to strengthen Indonesia’s defense capacity, improve weapon systems, and enhance military education and training, while reinforcing long-standing defense ties with the U.S.
Second, such things are not done in a rush. The negotiations have started October 31 2025 at the latest. Moreover, it's a relatively routine continuation of partnerships between the US and Indonesia, following such deals as the 2010 Defense Framework Arrangement, 2015 Joint Statement on Comprehensive Defense Cooperation, and Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of 2023. A bit earlier in October 2025, Jakarta has claimed they'll be buying Chinese jets. They're friendly to the US, but rather opportunistic fair-weather friends and have deals with a large array of countries. For example:
Russian Navy vessels arrive in Indonesia for rare bilateral drills By Ridzwan Rahmat | 01 April 2026
In a statement on 31 March, the Indonesian Navy described the visit as a symbol of growing defence ties between the two militaries.
“The presence of three Russian Federation warships in Jakarta is not merely a port call, but a strong symbol of bilateral relations,” Rear Admiral Uki Prasetia, Commander of the Indonesian Navy's Third Naval Area Command, said.
“We hope that synergies between the Indonesian Navy and the Russian Federation Navy will continue to deepen and also serve as a platform for positive cultural exchange,” he added.
All vessels in the delegation are operated by Russia's Pacific Fleet and are scheduled for a series of bilateral engagements including subject matter expert lectures, mutual ship visits, and naval drills.
The deeper meaning of the visit lies in Indonesia’s continuing effort to practise multi-vector defence diplomacy, engaging different major powers across the maritime domain without binding itself into an exclusive security architecture.
That approach is particularly important for a state sitting astride critical sea lanes, because Indonesia’s geography makes naval neutrality, maritime access management, and diversified security relationships central to its broader national resilience. By receiving Russian naval units while maintaining other defence relationships across the region and beyond, Jakarta reinforces the message that its foreign and defence policies remain sovereign, transactional, and rooted in national rather than bloc priorities.
Third, under Trump Indonesia has become even more pro-China than it was. In The State of Southeast Asia Survey Report, there's an annual question "If ASEAN were forced to align itself with one of the strategic rivals, which should it choose?". A year ago, 72.2% of surveyed Indonesians answered "China" (this was done right before the Liberation Day tariffs, where ASEAN in general and Indonesia in particular got fucked hard, and had to do a demeaning deal). Now it's 80.1%*. Malaysia slipped from 70.8% to 68.0%, though – good job there. Meanwhile Singapore, the only one which was more pro-US, has completely flipped, from 47.1% to 66.3% (what the hell, honestly). Those are the three states controlling the Strait of Malacca. (Overall ASEAN has gone to 52% in favor of China). Do you really think you're getting them on board with some blockade? When China is their economic lifeline, the natural regional hegemon and the 800 pound gorilla, and you've got a stable genius in control?
*correction, it was 80.1% before the beginning of the war with Iran, horrific fuel shortages throughout ASEAN, rapid depletion of US arsenal and the removal of THAAD from Korea (which, to remind you, had paid dearly for accepting said THAAD despite Chinese protests). I really wonder what ISEAS'2027 survey will be like! I predict 60% overall for ASEAN, and above 75% in the Strait.
This was just a little illustration of how much context there can be for every triumphalist Patriotic headline.
You have to realize that you're living in a MAGA information bubble where things get reported selectively and strategically, to construct a narrative. Things are even made happen to the same end. Trump urgently needs a Win to bolster morale of the Patriots, so he reaches into a cache of prefab "wins" and – aha, MDCP! – takes out one to present you as part of a 4D chess plan. It's not substantially different from his Truth Social posts where he says that the Strait is open or in the process of being opened three times a week. Trump himself is a victim of the same bubble, so he gets excited like a baby by videos of big explosions until it's clear even to him that the war is becoming a quagmire. You're expertly cheerleading for a pro wrestler who's deluded himself into thinking he really is a martial artist.
The might not, but clearly the theory that America is losing and will cut its losses is falsified already by the fact that America hasn’t surrendered yet.
The problem with surrendering to Iranian terms – or indeed, just ignoring Iran and leaving – is that this discredits the entire American Empire project, it is an admission of weakness following foolishness. You've already discredited the Empire a great deal with extracting THAAD missiles from Korea and freezing paid-for supplies to Europe, that's an unfalsifiable demonstration that you cannot currently sustain a high-intensity war against a peer adversary. But there's the cope that if Iran is vanquished or forced to accept some tolerable terms (which allow the US or Israel to repeat the aggression after replenishing the stockpiles, that is), the US will salvage its global standing. It's false, but just giving up will, of course, genuinely be worse. The longer this goes, the greater is the cost of cutting losses, and the greater the incentive to "see it through to the end". So you're simply stuck. It's not an enviable position to have.
Hard to imagine how American military planners weren’t aware that Iran would try to close the straits when this was the central fact of American war planning with Iran for 50 years.
Certainly, this was known, which is why everyone with half a brain in the admin told Trump that the war is a bad idea and Israelis are full of shit. However:
After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place. ---
Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable. He has publicly oscillated between demanding support from allies to help open it and insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need or want military assistance.
Trump is not the avatar of the great machinery of the United States Government. Remember: he's the guy you elected to drain the swamp.
P.S. It's unclear if you control Panama either.
P.P.S. Regarding the control of Taiwan, KMT is likely to win. Kuomintang Chair Cheng Li-wun has just met with Xi in Beijing, delivering a very interesting speech:
Today, after a lapse of ten years, leaders of our two parties are once again able to come together under the same roof for exchanges. …… The 15th Five-Year Plan has just begun, and it will surely take development to a new level. It is something well worth looking forward to. Although people on the two sides of the Strait live under different systems, we shall respect one another and also move toward one another. I believe that peace is a shared moral principle and shared value across the Strait. Both sides should rise above political confrontation and work together to think through and build a win-win and prosperous cross-Strait “community of shared future”, while seeking an institutional solution to prevent and avert war, so that the Taiwan Strait may become a model for the peaceful resolution of conflict in the world. …… Today I came to the Mainland at the invitation of General Secretary Xi as the representative of the Kuomintang. So, in my capacity as Chair of the Kuomintang, I naturally also hope that, following another rotation of parties in government in the future, I may be able to invite General Secretary Xi to visit Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu.
Make of that what you will.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
10d ago
Looking at the situation from Mars – isn't it a bit bizarre how so much attention is paid to antisemitism, how it's studied, dissected, treatments sought? Jews are a tiny global minority, they're a tiny minority even in their region. Zionists are a small minority. Generally speaking, such a thing as non-Jewish Zionism shouldn't even exist – we don't have a lot of, I don't know, Magyarists among non-Hungarians, constantly working to ensure that Hungary survives and cannot face any strategic threat from their neighbors. If Jews reliably evoke "Antisemitism" among people with completely different belief systems, from Communists to the far right, from Arabs to Scandinavians, from boomer Democrats to zoomer Republicans, from Beijing to Madrid – isn't the behavior of Jews deserving of much more scrutiny? Isn't the onus on them to prove that they should not be hated? Any other nation so widely hated is usually known to be doing some transparently objectionable bullshit. Yes, Jews have some sort of internal discourse about antisemitism, about Amalek, online radicalization and whatever. But – why does anyone else need to care? Everyone has justifications.
Of course the masses can be wrong and often are when they oppose some select group or thing. But why would we assume that the masses of Jews are less wrong? En masse, Israeli Jews don't even have high IQ, nor do they belong to a Western culture. These are nth generation European transplants, locals, various peoples like Yemenites (eg the notorious Ben-Gvir), the Haredi who exist outside of any civilization…
I don't see the argument for even considering this as a real question. Zionists don't operate on a theory anyway.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
10d ago
Opus is increasing end-user costs, not just changing the tokenizer
Is it? Is it now? For example, on this bench Opus 4.7 is almost as strong as Opus 4.6 but 8.3x cheaper, because it uses vastly fewer tokens. How does this fit into your theory?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
10d ago
Sophistry is not religious either.
I don't want to make a definition for this category because it's very loose, but basically it's "attempts at recursively improving your understanding via introspective self-play starting from a given set of verbal premises, without any significant role for procedures of updating on empirical, physical evidence".
One can see how this might well work in fields which really don't need an empirical physical component, such as math. Physics can inspire new subdomains of math, but strictly speaking we don't need this. An AI could train on its own data (+ easy verifiers and just corrected majority voting), entirely autonomously, to become an ever stronger mathematician.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
We have a good idea of how to train AI to solve mathematical problems, of virtually unbounded complexity. In the course of this, AI clearly learns "techniques" as shown here, if not "theories". I don't think King's prowess is theory-driven either, but in any case we don't have a good idea of how to train AI to be a good prose writer. We have some ideas, but are unlikely to act on them. There's not much money to be made in it, and plenty of highly motivated enmity – AI is already widely hated. and yes, autoregressive generation for the prompt "write like King" is not like King actually writing a novel. We have such tricks though.
My point is, it's not a general principle that AI will only rehash human techniques in some uninspired "probabilistic" way. If there is a hill to climb, such that "good" and "bad" outputs with regard to the problem statement can be distinguished, AI can bumble its way up the hill and also find new tricks. We've seen this before LLMs, with AlphaGo and move 37, we're starting to see it with LLMs.
while AIs appear to generate text using probabilistic hacks.
Human mind runs entirely on probabilistic mush. Neural networks were invented as approximation of our own approximate learning. But probabilistic decision processes can have clear enough decision boundaries that they become able to operate with "abstractions", "symbols" or "theories". They also remain able to fail. For example, you are failing to update on evidence, because you haven't been trained to take input like "Terry Tao is surprised" seriously and think it's infinitely less interesting than your preconceived notions, basically some dweeb noise. Unlike an LLM, you can update at lifetime, so maybe you'll reread the above post and see how it contradicts your position.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
Could you at least add more substance than "Opus changed tokenizer, therefore, as I've already said, AI is a bubble"?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
I don't pretend that AGI is some clean concept. For me, it means a very banal thing: an AI that can reliably replace a human worker. "I can point an LLM at a knowledge work task and it'll do it". Or at least: it'll commit to an honest humanlike attempt to do the job, it won't run out of context length, won't hallucinate something superficially related, won't trip on its own shoelaces; it'll reason about the problem, identify what it lacks, collect the necessary data, maybe do some trials in a scratchpad of sorts, consistently orient towards truth and common sense, do its best and then admit to me if something was still genuinely beyond its ability.
5.2 was a very big jump over 5/5.1 and it showed, in my opinion, a very powerful awareness of problems, an ability to contextualize and deconstruct them. 5.4 and the upcoming 5.5 clearly continue this trend. They've figured something out and I believe it's on the path to AGI as defined above, modulo technological details that seemingly won't be a long-term blocker.
Will it cure blindness and reverse aging?
Will anything? Will human scientists? I don't know. Plenty of things that human-level intelligence has so far proven unable to solve. But so long as science is knowledge work, yes I expect AGI to do it at least as well as we do.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
I don't understand this claim. Who "we"? Most people learn almost everything they know about economically valuable complex domains from textbooks, manuals, teacher's answers and such second-hand information, and then polish it with on-site instructions and increasingly long-range, open-ended training. They don't build much in the way of their own "techniques and theories" and there's not a world of difference from what LLMs now do. Maybe you're overestimating how much they depend on pretraining at this point. Well, it's believed that >50% of compute in some of the last-generation models goes towards RL, not pretraining on human data.
And as I've said in the opening post: we have literally just seen an LLM employ a technique no human mathematician had thought of using in this specific context, to solve a problem that had remained unsolved since 1968 – over half a century! It wasn't some Riemann hypothesis tier challenge, but it wasn't exactly obscure either, smart professional mathematicians had been working on it for years before GPT 5.4 Pro came and did this. Moreover, GPT does this reliably. In the comments you can see Terence Tao, arguably the guy with the greatest knowledge of "techniques and theories" of math on the planet Earth, an expert of such level that he actively avoids getting roped into solving other people's frontier research level problems, seriously engage with GPT's work:
Thanks! So there does seem to be something special about the original von Mangoldt process - the associated invariant measure ν is extremely smooth (in the Archimedean sense), being asymptotic to 1/nlogn , while all the variants of this measure pick up arithmetic factors such as 1∏pvp(n)!
- A little surprising to me that removing individual primes instead of prime powers makes it less likely to have prime multiplicity, but I'll chalk it up to one of the numerous probability paradoxes that arise when one tries to compare various weighted expectations. But these factors mean that one cannot immediately solve #1196 by using these processes instead of the von Mangoldt one, as the invariant measure is no longer asymptotic to 1/nlogn
- So in some sense the AI was "lucky" in finding the one approach that actually worked; it would be interesting to publish the traces to see if there was a lot of brute force involved in trying nearby approaches which didn't quite work.
……
Arb Research has kindly shared with me ten separate runs of GPT 5.4 Pro on this problem #1196 (with a request not to use internet search). From a quick reading, it appears that 8 of them claimed successes, with the other 2 rating the claim as plausible. Interestingly, several of the successful runs actually obtained the sharper formula ∑n≤Aν(n)≤1 that was also derived here, with ν essentially the Mellin transform of 1/ζ(s)
- Almost all of the runs latched on to the approach of constructing a random chain with a good hitting probability (many runs referred to this as the "Lubell method", after the Lubell of the LYM inequality).
Another notable fact is that none of the runs highlighted the von Mangoldt process that was a prominent feature of the original run (and none of them mention flow networks either). Runs 4 and 7 have an interesting alternate construction of the upward divisibility chain in terms of exponential clocks in the prime factorization indices that actually looks rather tractable to work with; I will need to study this construction further when I have more time.
Basically it seems that for this particular type of problem there are several natural ways to proceed that make the problem actually quite tractable; the literature had managed to focus on a somewhat suboptimal approach in which the opening move was to transfer the problem to a continuous setting, but the AI runs consistently stayed in the discrete world and managed to utilize various existing tools from discrete mathematics (mostly centering around methods relating to the LYM inequality) to reach a solution.
So I don't know. Where's this inherent limit on complexity that you're talking about? What in our culture is truly irreducibly complex, if not math that can surprise Terence Tao?
This is getting a bit comical, don't you think?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse.
Yes, this follows from data processing inequality.
Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.
No. It applies just as well to humans. And humans did not build a civilization by thinking really hard at a corpus of word sequences. Oh, we tried this too, to an extent, and got wonders like Sophistry, Rabbinical Judaism, Medieval Scholasticism, Marxism and Rationalism. But we mostly progressed by receiving environmental feedback, filtering the generated data and preferentially training on validated fraction. Similar logic can be applied to LLMs (or any ML artifacts). This is why the basic trick of the current paradigm is RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards). You finetune a model on successful trajectories, then you give it tasks and update towards policy that has generated correct conclusions. The primary source of updates is the model itself, steered by an external verifier. In principle they can do this fully autonomously, by building an ontology of possible tasks that can be algorithmically verified, coding these verifiers, and generating (eg relying on web search) queries against these tasks.
Even under very rudimentary realistic assumptions, generated data improves model performance.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
OK but do you agree that "Anthropic has slightly altered their tokenizer in a 0.1 update for Opus" is not really "controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines"? Which tribe has a strong position on Anthropic's tokenization design choices?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.
Look man, it seems that the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change functionally amounts to them forcing each whitespace be a separate token rather than part of any subword, removing all whitespace-containing subwords from the vocab; it does not change the compression rate for whitespace-free languages. I do not know why Anthropic did that, but my hypothesis is that they've found in experiments that this is better in some valuable scenarios, such as related to analyzing code for vulnerabilities; trained Claude Mythos with it; and now are pushing Opus further via distillation from Mythos (this is suggested by it being weirdly different, and them saying they now focus on GraphWalks, which Mythos is doing really great on, for evaluating long-context performance).
For logprob distillation, you ideally need identical vocabulary (there are copes for inter-tokenizer logprob matching, but better just change the student model's tokenizer and heal it).
As a datapoint in the timeline of AI progress, it's a total nothingburger, a non-news.
Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability.
Do you realize that while this is bad for users, it's not that good for Anthropic? The compute and memory cost per a sequence of 1 million tokens is the same whether these tokens encode 1 million or 500 thousand English words. It doesn't improve the profit margin. Of course, now that everyone's codebase is functionally like 40% "larger", they are selling more tokens to their captive clientele for each plaintext-identical request. But this would be such an awkward growth hack. And on Claude Plan, cache is free anyway, so their margins could even shrink.
For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?
Yes. After GPT 5.2 I've become a bit paranoid that we will have AGI before 2028 and are totally unprepared. Recent events such as GPT 5.4 autonomously solving Erdos #1196 with a trick that no human mathematician expected corroborate my feeling.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
12d ago
Pride is a rough master, and that velvet glove / participation trophy empire thing that the US was doing with Europe just sparked resentment.
If you think the US is currently treating Europe with more respect than China does and THAT explains the decline of loyalty to Atlanticist project, this speaks to your enormous, delusional entitlement. Just for one thing, Xi gives kingly receptions to European dignitaries, while Trump says they're kissing his ass and publicly relishes refusing their pleas for lenience. I suppose he operates on your theory too.
Seeing upvote/downvote ratio, I guess little more can be said.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
No, they're just quislings who were already sucking up to China because China is an asshole that thinks they're subhuman.
I hope you realize this sounds a bit unhinged.
Europeans here have commented plenty on the asinine degree of hatred the MAGA crowd had suddenly developed for them. I think it's a reaction akin to jealousy, and it's always ugly and pitiful. Little more to say. Except:
China is retrenching and reconsidering Taiwan plans after watching their tech fail the last four months
Nothing of the sort happened, the only active "Chinese tech" I'm positively sure has been defeated was HQ-2 that dates to, like, Cultural Revolution. Xi is currently negotiating with KMT representative, in China. They're feeling really comfortable. You seem to inhabit a thick MAGA bubble. This is unhealthy. Try to check out alternative sources, and preferably not the outgroup but some professional ones.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
To the best of my knowledge, the terms are as follows:
1—Commitment to non-aggression
2—Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz
3—Acceptance of uranium enrichment
4—Lifting of all primary sanctions
5—Lifting of all secondary sanctions
6—Termination of all UN Security Council resolutions
7—Termination of all Board of Governors resolutions
8—Payment of compensation to Iran
9—Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region
10—Cessation of war on all fronts, including against Hezbollah in Lebanon
They do not say anything about collecting the transit fee (good global diplomacy), but seem to directly demand reparations from the aggressor parties. Not to mention all the other stuff, especially #9 and #3. (Sanctions/resolutions items and war items are I think reasonable/obvious given the situation). This is much more hardcore than what they've been asking for yesterday, in response to Kushner-Witkoff's undisclosed 15 points list, allegedly a capitulation-with-extra-steps ultimatum. And their old 10 points were already bold, including the bit about $2M per ship that they dropped in favor of… well, all this.
I have seen no evidence that Trump is unaware of the specific content of the list. He's reposting Iranian statement, which is devoid of details.
Needless to say, the new list amounts to strategic defeat for the US. I don't see how Trump can accept it in good faith (nevermind Israel; Israelis are seething or coping, and of course will in any case proceed with the usual lower-level conflict, just as Iran will, seeing its preference for maintaining its proxies). So it's another 2 weeks of market manipulation, threats and TACO, if not straight up back to war, I guess. This is surely far from over.
But the sheer fact that Trump was pushed to go from "tonight, a whole civilization will die" to using Iranian list instead of his son-in-law's is telling enough. Beyond this point, this won't be a clean win for the US no matter what.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
Trump has caused hundreds of billions in damage with Liberation Day tariffs, attacked Denmark and forced EU allies to orient towards China, basically wrecked NATO by this point, foolishly escalated against the same China and got humiliated in Busan, exposing American industrial ineptitude (particularly to Korea), is about to lose Taiwan, and is in the process of shaving off 1% or so off the global GDP growth. That's just the big foreign policy stuff I care about, domestic policy is discussed daily here.
That loyalists conveniently forget such issues or reframe them into WINS is unsurprising.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
Donald Trump did not trick his way into office and then surprise everyone by acting in a manner unbecoming of a president
He apparently surprised Catturd and other major boosters who were celebrating NO MORE FOREIGN WARS upon his election. That said, they've quickly pivoted, now foreign wars are Based.
The people of the United States of America decided to elect someone who breaks all the rules of what a president is 'supposed' to do. They don't care what the president is 'supposed' to do, they care whether the president is doing what they want him to do.
This is mostly sophistry, but I suppose you are making a sharp point: the problem is not Trump, it's the American people.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
Four years of ineffectual flailing due to political sabotage, 4 years out of power, and now a bit over a year of uninterrupted and unprecedented shitshow. The list of his follies is very long, but an American consumer is very rich, so can ignore it for a time. Still, it hasn't been a long time. What did you mean by ten years?
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
Can't argue with gigachad responses.
BigObjectPermanenceShill
24d ago
Yeah, that's the kind of thing people said when Dubya was compared to his father, whether it be the vomiting incident or the broccoli one. Yes, each Republican will be worse than the last, I understand.
Just so I understand, too:
While attending a banquet hosted by Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa on January 8, 1992, U.S. president George H. W. Bush fainted after vomiting onto Miyazawa's lap at around 20:20 JST. The incident took place at the Naikaku Sōri Daijin Kōtei in Tokyo, the Prime Minister's personal residential quarters. Doctors later attributed the incident to a case of acute gastroenteritis.
"During his tenure as the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush frequently mentioned his distaste for broccoli, famously saying: "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid. And my mother made me eat it."
And now:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP […] A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.
Is that it? Is your reaction to a claim that the latter is qualitatively worse than the former just an eyeroll about those pearl-clutching libs with TDS who nitpick at gaffes and bully awkward Republican presidents?
Have you considered that it is in fact possible for your side to be getting considerably worse over time, or rather, that specifically Trump is worse than Dubya?
Do you have any absolute frame of reference, or is it just anchored to the current intensity of lib chatter?
It seems to be common knowledge that the Left had in some ways gotten worse over time. Do you say it's a priori implausible the same has happened on your team?
You're welcome, I believe honesty is the best policy.
If you need to resort to such snark, it kind of gives the game away. What is the point? Initially, you've said: "In the middle of the war he secured an alliance with Indonesia. America now controls Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan and is in the process of controlling Hormuz. The world’s great supply chain chokepoints. These are not isolated events but obviously part of a greater vision. Tariffs and manufacturing and industrial policy are all related."
So i'm commenting on this idea, not some general principle that Trump makes every country committed to tearing down every possible deal and MOU with the US.And as I've said, Indonesia gains more in this partnership (it is not clear what the US gains). Prabowo is a pragmatic guy, he'll accept handouts, from Trump, Xi, Putin or anyone else. So long as they don't get to put a leash on him.
Minor nitpick: it's a Singaporean poll, of Indonesians. Specifically of those with good information access and influence on making decisions:
It's not a survey of third worlders in the streets.
I salute your loyalty to the cause, then.
But you are weak. Not relative to Iran, that'd be ludicrous and nobody except unironic third worldists predicted that, but relative to the inflated image which you have created.
You've started a war and clearly want out of it already. Abandoned bases in a wide radius around Iran. Your soldiers have been hiding in civilian hotels. You're unable to open the Strait, so you instead resort to blockading it This Chad Thundercock attitude towards "beancounting" is very funny when three digits is a good volume for annual production of your standoff munition. This is all material, papable weakness.
I don't know what bubble you are in if not the MAGA one. I also notice the absence of "Europe", but ofc that's not as important as "the Middle East". [Speaking of the Middle East, though](https://archive.is/2criR.
More options
Context Copy link