domain:philippelemoine.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12m ago
No, it just has a couple people arguing that it would be a good idea and that they should totally do it. Maybe they reflect the views of the Israeli leadership, maybe they don't. It's only a couple years since we've gotten around to admitting that Israel even has nukes, and I certainly would not expect them to announce that they target "allied" capitols as a matter of policy when they won't admit the weapons even exist.
David Perlmutter In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter.
Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow—it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Samson in Gaza? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?[32]
In his 2012 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, the American Jewish author Ron Rosenbaum described this opinion piece as "goes so far as to justify a Samson Option approach".[33] In that book, Rosenbaum also opined that in the "aftermath of a second Holocaust", Israel could "bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)" as well as the "holy places of Islam." and that the "abandonment of proportionality is the essence" of the Samson Option.[dubious – discuss][34]
Martin van Creveld In 2003, a military historian, Martin van Creveld, thought that the Second Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence.[35] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch (2003) as saying:
We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.[36]
Maybe these two are entirely unrepresentative. Seems pretty on-brand for the Israelis to me, but your mileage may vary.
mildly_benis
14m ago
We don't really know what China would do if they had complete dominion over ethnic Europeans. It hasn't really happened before.
1945 was not total US dominion over ethnic Europeans, and even from there it's a long way to 'essentially unlimited capacity to act'. What would US do with that? Maybe I'm naive, I don't know much about China, I am aware of the outlines of the Mao period, but don't think we have reasons to think the Chinese singleton variant is obviously the worse one.
ArmedTooHeavily
24m ago
I just read that whole article, nowhere does it say that israel has nuclear weapons targeted at its allies' cities.
ResoluteRaven
32m ago
The taboo against using nuclear weapons is strong enough that I think their next use by a state might be a demonstration strike with plenty of advanced warning in an isolated area to intimidate an adversary into submission e.g. by Russia in Ukraine. Another possibility is as the last act of a collapsing regime or nation if e.g. South Korean troops close in on Pyongyang, Arab armies overrun Tel Aviv, or revolutionaries in Iran are breaking down the Ayatollah's doors, but I imagine that in most scenarios people are smart enough not to force the issue and to give the leadership a way out.
Now if we're limiting this to nukes fired in anger in an all-out war there could be a tit-for-tat scenario that goes like this: China hits an aircraft carrier with an anti-ship missile carrying a nuclear warhead, the President calls the Politburo and says "we are going to retaliate, either you offer up a comparable sacrificial lamb or you all die," China chickens out and allows a bunch of ships or a major military base to be nuked, a ceasefire is signed, and everyone sits down to contemplate their life choices.
Meanwhile, non-state actors are a wild card and in the long run I'm sure someone will get their hands on a bomb and use it, but I don't know if the odds of that occurring in this century are particularly high. Terrorists aiming for a high body count these days would probably go for biological weapons or diseases like smallpox if they could, given how much less conspicuous and more effective they are at actually killing people.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
34m ago
Most likely because prominent Israelis and Jewish intellectuals keep saying so when discussing Israeli nuclear strategy.
Rov_Scam
36m ago
Maybe it's just that it's an AI event where this kind of thing is par for the course? I mean, one of the best-known AI "experts" is Yudkowsky, who doesn't even have the benefit of a GED and never did any substantive work on AI in his life. He founded an NGO at 21 and has been leeching off of the Silicon Valley money machine ever since. At least an HR manager has experience in making sure everyone gets paid on time.
Qwortech
41m ago
I think in interest of actual usability, two scores could be used on a positive/neutral/negative scale: 'value' and 'agreement'. You could remove the neutral if you want since it's basically the default reading of a non-vote. So then you get +/- on value and agreement. Lots of times I can see value in posts that I disagree with and my usual habit has always been to prioritize that as the metric I use. Others prioritize agreement. Maybe you could separate them out. I have my doubts that it would work, but maybe.
hydroacetylene
49m ago
everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.
That does happen, but usually with people who are a bit loopy to begin with. Honestly I’m not sure that oversheltering can be cleanly distinguished from controlling parenting or general nuttiness in a lot of those cases.
Like I said, homeschoolers seem to have a pretty wide variance IME. Most are more or less average, some produce kids that are ready to be normal, functional adults by 16, some produce 25 year olds that act like middle schoolers. Going entirely off the worst cases leaves doesn’t paint a good picture, but neither does going entirely off the best.
Felagund
1hr ago
American society used to have a much larger distaste for money being wasted in this kind of corrupt way.
I think societal norms and character of a people play a bigger role in outcomes than people tend to think. Our turn to welfare spending following the great depression changed pretty dramatically how people relate to the government, and it is bad.
ArmedTooHeavily
1hr ago
Why in the world would you think that?
Skibboleth
1hr ago
In my opinion, the greatest fault of Capitalism, and the real problem that is behind it, is that it is so productive that can share money to unproductive people, creating a new caste of Priestly Propagandist
Is that a fault of Capitalism? Most societies, including non-capitalist/pre-capitalist ones, have/had some kind of priestly/moral class. Such as literal priests.
'Actually effective' is the load-bearing term here, because the effect of using a nuclear weapon in the current era isn't actually the degree of damage, but the nature. Fat Man and Little Boy were not 'actually effective' nukes by the standards which make extremely precise timing and more complex systems important to effectiveness. Fat Man and Little Boy were small, inefficient, and wasteful. They were also effective politically, which is what matters, and which is what will matter for the effects that a ground-based rather than air-burst nuclear weapon is going for.
The maximum effectiveness of the bomb on a technical efficiency ground (explosiveness per amount of material) is secondary to the scary nuke factor success and the geopolitical implications that would be the target motive. Even nuclear 'fizzle' explosions would be considered historic successes, despite being a tiny fraction of the potential of an 'actually effective' bomb. The value of the nuclear demonstration is the fact that it is nuclear, that the target wasn't able to stop you, and that no one knows if you can do so again.
No one's going to get hit with a 12% technical effectiveness nuclear detonation and go 'ha, those losers couldn't even do the trigger detonations better!'
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.
This is fair, but at the same time I object to all this plain old giving up I see, and simply assuming everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.
LOL what makes you say that?
JTarrou
1hr ago
Capitalism is an economic system connected to a society that is primarily status driven. It's superiority at transferring goods and services does not imply an immunity to spending the resulting profits on signaling.
That's why capitalism works. It's not for itself.
ToZanarkand
1hr ago
I don't think future attempts at Oct 7th style attacks by themselves will test the viability of Israel as a state. My point was that the lesson that nations like Iran will (correctly IMO) draw from this is that such an attack gets Israel diplomatically isolated and threatened with sanctions for trying to respond, while its supposed main ally actively sabotages its attempts to achieve its war aims (see Biden delaying the initial Gaza invasion, and then the whole circus about refusing to allow a Rafah invasion for months) and even gives permission for further attacks against Israel. I don't think a war with Hezbollah tomorrow will lead to Israel getting destroyed, but Iran can keep refunding and re-arming them, Israel will find it increasingly hard to recover from war losses over the coming decades as the west and the US continues to abandon them under Democrat administrations while further embracing Iran.
gilmore606
1hr ago
Lex Fridman. Yuval Noah Harari. And let's be honest : Big Yud.
jkf
1hr ago
Then the sample set is too small and unrepresentative -- for how many years of those 80 has there been a direct hot-war between two (or more) nuclear capable countries?
Who_Cares
1hr ago
Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.
Fake email-and-excel engineering jobs can be done anywhere your imagination takes you.
JulianRota
1hr ago
I'm not in a position to know for sure what the setup is on any particular nation's nuclear devices (and of course if I was I sure wouldn't post about it on a public internet forum), but from what I've heard, it's entirely possible to put in place arming codes that are not trivial to circumvent.
Implosion devices depend on extremely precise timing between all of the charges placed around the core. In early devices, this was kept simple by having the whole thing be spherical and all of the wires be exactly the same length connecting the conventional detonators to a single power source. There's no reason that needs to be the case though. Varying the wire lengths, detonator positions, core shape etc introduces complex timing requirements that might only be known by the software, or possibly even encoded into the arming code.
It's also my understanding that modern high-yield devices have more complex detonation chains, requiring mini-accelerators to be turned on, other gasses to be dispensed, etc at just the right time. So it's probably not trivial to get around coding issues like that without being a nuclear engineer yourself. At least, as long as the organization designing it wants to make it so and cares enough to make sure it's actually effective.
Tomato
1hr ago
Is this federal money? My impression around Silicon Valley is that this is much more likely to be VCs/grifting startups spending pensioners money on pointless marketing events like this.
gilmore606
1hr ago
I would bet almost anything that Israel's few nukes are targeted at the capital cities of their allies.
Who_Cares
1hr ago
I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t remember a single teacher or professor from my school years fondly, except for the 10th grade English teacher that 15-year-old me badly wanted to fuck. And I attended very highly ranked (albeit public) schools and a historically top tier university program. I certainly didn’t think of these people as high status.
But I’ve read a fair number of sappy “the amazing teacher I’ll never forget” stories from Redditors over the years, so I’ll concede that I’m probably a minority.
I know a couple actual women in AI (not in the "I can call an LLM through an API" sense but in the "I was a listed author on the GPT-4 paper" sense), and the funny thing is that they despise things like @WomenInAI, who constantly spam them begging for a crumb of interest or validation. Their general attitude seems to be "why bother to spend time with a bunch of wannabe clout chasers whose only exceptional quality is being a mid-tier woman adjacent to tech, when I could instead spend the time helping create a God?" Which is, at the least, an attempt to produce something real.
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