domain:alexberenson.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
It's the same picture. The government won't give up until it has won.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
Yes, there are negative consequences of such limitations. Of course, if that Hezbollah cell does anything, the citizen can still go through the criminal process for it as a citizen. The alternative is that 40 years post-naturalization you've got people poring through old records looking for a lie big enough to denaturalize someone.
And note it is longer than 3 years -- it take 3 years to become a citizen from getting a green card, if you're married to a citizen, and 5 years otherwise.
Lizzardspawn
6hr ago
Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.
Israel is obviously not going to agree to that. If Iran provides Hamas a bomb, Hamas will use it; Hamas does not have the self control to merely threaten for long, nor the ability to hide it for long (which means "use it or lose it" makes sense), regardless of what Israel does (aside from cease to exist). If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb, that's the same as Iran threatening to nuke Israel; the presence of Hamas changes nothing.
They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.
Little nukes like that don't change much unless they can get them into the Knesset. (And the settlers are irrelevant; every Israeli could fuck back off behind the Green Line and the Palestinians would still demand the river to the sea)
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing.
One would think! And yet.
Corvos
6hr ago
Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:
- They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
- They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.
Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.
Barfknuckle
6hr ago
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
Ludicrous comparison. TDS.
thejdizzler
6hr ago
I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.
cjet79
6hr ago
There are some flavors of libertarians that derive a lot of stuff from contracts.
I suppose I see contracts as more of a good operating system, but the way violence is wielded and property rights are protected is more like having CPU and motherboard for your computer.
cjet79
6hr ago
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing. Citing to a nonexistent case or statute compromises the entire brief or argument. A decent first year associate might misinterpret a statute or case, or miss that the case was overturned, but they wouldn't make up cases from whole cloth and build their arguments off those.
For a lot of tasks, you just need to go through and proofread or fix up the places where it filled in basic info that it obviously didn't have.
But citing a case that doesn't exist to build an argument is like asking it to design a bridge and it get the tensile strength of steel completely wrong, or perhaps it makes up a type of material that doesn't exist and hallucinates its properties as part of the specifications.
And maybe it does that, I don't know. But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.
And it really shouldn't be hard to fix, the caselaw and statutes are already simple to look up. Just teach the thing to use WestLaw.
So I do expect them to solve that particular class of hallucinations pretty handily, even if it will still completely fudge its outputs when it doesn't have an easy way to check.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?
2D3D
7hr ago
Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.
No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.
YE_GUILTY
7hr ago
But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7hr ago
I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk. If the majority of your ancestors weren't enslaved Americans, you're not "African-American" and thus not entitled to any of the affirmative action schemes intended to benefit that group. You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.
So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.
As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.
zeke5123a
7hr ago
And this is why the activists win. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.
I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed.
No_one
8hr ago
None of these animals are enemies of their predators, they're merely snacks. Those features you listed exist to induce the predator to choose another snack.
If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other
Nothing in my original post implies Israelis do not know this. Obviously they, the HOG are certain to know Iranians have nukes, or are right at the threshold. They're probably hard at work trying to get high-res photos of said nukes because accusations without proof aren't that interesting today.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Iran would never give the Arabs they sponsor that kind of independent power.
Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!
Happy Independence Day!
America is an awesome country filled with great people and is responsible for many of the best things that have happened to the world over the past 100 years. I say this quite genuinely as someone who doesn't live in the US. It deserves appreciation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9hr ago
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
If this were true, why would the animal world be full of animals that are mildly poisonous, taste bad, have spines etc.? Why do bees sting large animals that threaten the hive?
As long as your enemy's value function includes terms other than your destruction, any damage you can inflict upon them can be a deterrent. If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other enemies going forward, and simply make it harder for it to thrive as a nation. These are all considerations that might, in some situations, change the balance and make Israel decide to leave Iran alone even if they would rather attack it otherwise.
I'll think about this. My sense is that the base relationship is what matters. The base social relationship is talking. The base family relationship is love/nurture. The base relationship with the state seems to be an imbalanced power dynamic in favor of the state.
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