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- ICE is not personally loyal to Trump
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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22hr ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms
This is a tremendously underwhelming endorsement. Being exploited by brutal overlords who demand sycophantic bootlicking is pretty normal in world historical terms. Being a subsistence farming peasant is pretty normal in world historical terms. Fifty percent child mortality is pretty normal in world historical terms. I have no idea why we would accept "normal in world historical terms" when we're presently doing far better and we know we can do better still.
American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably
In the sense that you can always be a submissive peasant with no rights worth respecting. In the sense that it actually accommodates everyone, no.
2rafa
16hr ago
How many nuclear strikes on Israel, are an acceptable price to pay for getting rid of him?
It’s an interesting question. Consider the following points:
-
Half the world’s Jewish population lives outside Israel. Most are Zionists. Large reservoirs of highly fecund 6+ tfr Orthodox Jews live in the United States and indeed in Western Europe. It is unlikely that Iran nuking Israel would kill more Jews than the Holocaust, which the Jewish population will recover from in less than 100 years. The question is therefore some variant of “would a nuclear war between Israel and Iran spell the permanent end of (at least this iteration of) Jewish settlement in the Levant?”.
-
Rich American and European Jews have the money to fund the reconstruction of Israel, which is possible unless it is overrun. If it is overrun then all reconstruction is impossible, since there are probably no mercenary armies capable of retaking it and even the US likely wouldn’t. However, Iran alone can’t mount a ground invasion of Israel and Iranian proxies have been badly damaged by the recent conflict. The overrunning scenario therefore involves a kind of organic jihad - post nuclear strike - in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, marching across into a ruined Israel and taking it. This is entirely possible and that should be acknowledged. However, such a march could be stymied by Western air support in service of a surviving Israeli civilian, military and mercenary force in theory, depending on the global geopolitical situation.
I think the answer is unclear. I don’t believe Israel would invite nuclear war. But that they would lose is not fully certain, even if it is likely for reasons of Israel’s Arab neighbors and Iran’s strategic depth and lower population density.
anon_
15hr ago
It's not interpretation (good/bad) of a regular law, it's interpretation (good/bad) of the constitutional assignment of powers.
It makes a huge difference. A bad interpretation of a law can be corrected by the political branches. So the stakes are quite different.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19hr ago
· Edited 19hr ago
What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though? Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel, and though Israel and the US share a relationship that is as close as lips and teeth at the moment, "dump Israel and ally with Hamas instead" is a real political position that is represented by a non-trivial number of native actors in the American system. If against all odds those actors were to come into power and implement their agenda, should pro-Israelis be (retroactively) denaturalized? Would there be a way at all to get legally and irreversibly naturalised in a futureproof way without staunchly refusing to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine and perhaps also every other important geopolitical issue where the US may switch sides in the future, or perhaps at most enthusiastically participating in the current Two Minutes of Hate whatever the target?
(And then, what classes of enmity are we considering? For smaller-scope questions than foreign alliances, the government position may flip every four years. Can Democrats denaturalize "Latinos for Trump"?)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
Video game ass logic.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms, and American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably(the only non-negotiable are anti child gender transition, pro Trump, and anti communism).
No_one
2hr ago
That's what I am saying.
But the only way to do it is thermonuclear weapons.
20*20 kilotons on Israel would be catastrophic but it'd be survivable for Israel.
It'd not be survivable for Iranian government.
100*400 kilotons would destroy Israel, possibly even partially prevent retaliation.
That's the moment when Iran would have true deterrence and MAD with Israel.
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5hr ago
Well, they've gotten better and better over time. I've been using LLMs before they were cool, and we've probably seen between 1-2 OOM reduction in hallucination rates. The bigger they get, the lower the rate. It's not like humans are immune to mistakes, misremembering, or even plain making shit up.
In fact, some recent studies (on now outdated models like Claude 3.6) found zero hallucinations at all in tasks like medical transcription and summarization.
It's a solvable problem, be it through human oversight or the use of other parallel models to check results.
ResoluteRaven
9hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.
In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
11hr ago
Well, yeah; this is 100% an autistic Christian thing.
You make yourself an enemy of the God of America when you lie on the form, because He knows the contents of your heart and what is done in secret.
That is why "lying on the form about the contents of your heart" is accepted by American culture as both valid, and an offense that strips you of any right to participate in it so long as they see fit that the question remains on the form.
Interestingly, it doesn't actually make any moral judgment- it still maintains the presupposition that there are good people who are also [disqualifying class]- but then, if the man be good, he would not lie on the forms because [see above].
Thus lying on the form is, while a completely natural thing to do, a sin -> if you were good, you're certainly an enemy of God [and by extension, the country] now -> OK to revoke and eject on those grounds.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
18hr ago
I really wish that we could give support that prevented recipients from accumulating any sort of status goods while receiving said support. I'd be fine with giving away a relatively generous amount of benefits so long as the condition of accepting them was that they essentially had to drop out of any related status competitions as a condition of receiving that support.
Someone should remind the North Koreans their 'GDP' is small, so they can't provide more shells to Russia than Europe (huge GDP!)
If someone told the North Koreans that having a higher GDP meant you could buy more foreign weapons, I'm sure they'd agree. In any case, I don't know how this supports your original claim that "merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic".
Israel gets the most advanced US weapons to fight a few Arabs, while Ukraine gets second-rate equipment, F-16s rather than F-35s, in a war with Russia.
Plenty of other countries also get F35s, like Belgium, who don't even have Arabs to fight.
The distinction is that all other US allies bring something to the table.
Israel brings plenty to the table, although I suspect you're too emotionally invested in a certain point of view to ever accept any evidence of this.
Britain, Australia, Canada will send troops to help America too.
Because they have mutual defence treaties. Such an agreement between the US and Israel would be drastically more in Israel's favour than America's, given how much more often Israel is attacked. Frankly if you want a single piece of evidence that America foreign policy isn't beholden to Israeli interests, this would probably be it.
They create enemies for America, they harm collaboration with the Islamic world,
Every vaguely functional Islamic country is already onside with the US (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, etc). Iran's hate for the US goes far beyond Israel. The original reason the US chose to ally with with Israel during the Cold War is because it wasn't one of the Arab states aligned with the USSR.
they sell military technology to China
This is the only legitimate criticism of Israel I've seen you make so far.
Suck up aid like a leech.
I'd advise you to look at those aid numbers again. They're small when it comes to how wealthy Israel is, and insignificant to the US. And I'm not sure why you'd consider Israel a leech and not Ukraine when Ukraine has been getting much larger amounts of aid over the past few years.
They even got the US to pay off their neighbours too, Egypt and to a lesser extent Jordan get billions in aid for being nice to Israel, the aid started as soon as they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Egypt and Jordan get money to keep their governments from falling apart. Neither poses anything close to a threat to Israel. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed six years after the Yom Kippur war ended with Israel advancing on Cairo, because relations and with and recognition from the largest Arab state were worth way more to Israel than continuing to humiliate Egypt further.
If it weren't for Israeli influence, the war wouldn't have happened.
I doubt it, but it doesn't matter, because the claim that Israel caused the war isn't sufficient for your argument that the US almost always prioritises Israeli foreign policy over its own.
The US has bombed Yemen and Iran, given Israel munitions to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. US troops were infamously on the ground in Lebanon before getting blown up and departing.
On a scale from complete non-intervention to ground invasions in all the countries mentioned (which is probably what most Israelis would like to happen if they could choose), the US' historical actions in the ME are overwhelmingly closer to the isolationist side of that spectrum.
Just because the Israel lobby doesn't get everything they want all of the time
Didn't you start by saying something very close to this? The particular quote being:
Occasionally the US tries to do something that actually prioritizes American interests over Israel's, the Israel lobby usually nixes this in the end
In any case:
It doesn't mean their influence isn't excessive.
Is much more reasonable than the original position you staked out.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
I expect that when people usually say that, they're implicitly stating strong belief that the problems are both solvable and being solved. Not that this necessarily means that such claims are true..
cjet79
8hr ago
You say in the first paragraph that libertarians are wrong and reductive to call government enforcement a form of violence.
You say in the second paragraph that obviously government is violence and it always has been, and only an idiot would think otherwise.
So which is it?
If it is the second paragraph that is true I don't disagree with you. If it's the first paragraph I do disagree with you.
And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!
If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.
The people of a nation are made up of individuals. You are one such individual. Where do you personally draw the line? What social projects do you think are necessary enough to be enforced with violence? I can't speak with "the people of the nation" I can only speak with individuals.
This vagueness of thrusting off responsibility for calling for the violence is also familiar.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
17hr ago
Citruline 8grams
Also your dick will get harder - best supplement in the business
Mix some with water and drink before you do your rucking
I get the 2lb bag on Amazon from Bulk Supplements
they just need enough to make the cost of a nuclear exchange so high Israel would never risk it
But this has further implications that you omit.
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.
In this way, the Hamasi would serve as the permanent Iranian veto over the [Ashke]nazi. Because they simply don't care if the Israelis nuke them in response- the fact is, the Israelis get hurt far more than the Palestinians, the Palestinians are suicidal, and that is sufficient to accomplish this goal.
Conversely, if Israel believes that Iran will, or already has, or will inevitably soon obtain, a bomb like this... then their only response is to start removing the local kebab as fast as humanly possible. 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.
The Iron Dome can stop a lot but the bomber is going to get through. And sure, Hamas could always attack from another country (perhaps one in which they seek refuge after the dust settles), but in that case that other country [and its people] are collateral the Israelis can threaten such that Hamas is kept down- since if Hamas manages to get an attack off then it's the entire host nation's problem, and Israel becomes the one with the nuclear veto.
Blueberry
21hr ago
Wickard v Filburn is insane mental gymnastics, but in the politics of its time it makes sense: Every farmer wanted regulation to prop up stable prices and Filburn defected (always hated). Wheat couldn’t be exported as world prices were much lower. Congress was seen as doing their job and any other decision by the court would have been seen as head-in-clouds-lawyers screwing up a common sense solution, that is why the decision was 9-0.
A constitional amendment would have been cleaner
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
18hr ago
Bang on. Really good programmers are a rarity and aren't building ai garbage at yc. "I'm at YC, if a guy working under me swindled me, then he must be good too" should be interpreted as "I'm at YC, if I get swindled this easily then I probably need to code more".
Indians defending this fucking pajeet ticked me off because I know two three who post here, live in the US and are doing very good work in startups over there.
YC is a popularity contest now, you can get in via multiple referrals. They keep taking more people in each year, everyone's building LLM APIs with janky Javascript as a service. These guys, no offence, are not good devs. They're young to begin with, my age usually or older and gravitating towards vaporware is a clear sign of decay.
What irks me is that he may face zero negative consequences for pulling off scams, whilst those affected will go and bat for him.
No_one
20hr ago
Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.
Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.
The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.
Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.
Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.
So, in conclusion:
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
- feed Israeli narrative
- not actually provide them with the required capability to deter anyone
- cause normies in Israel/West to demand an actual end to Iranian nuclear program
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
anon_
22hr ago
If we're looking at individual provisions to hate, the senior citizen tax cut is an egregious transfer of wealth from the productive/fertile segment of society to the geriatric. It is, by any standard of new conservatism, an absolute disaster. If anything, we ought to tax the geriatric to give to young folks that may actually have kids and generate wealth.
Then again, it's hard to evaluate this in the broader context of a huge bill stuffed with hundreds of other provisions. Taken in isolation, it's awful, how the entire cake is baked together into a single must-pass thing is just a failure of our political process to actually deliberate and legislate.
The take on “modern art” isn’t great. The impressionists were the first to engage with photography, and everyone loves those haystacks, water lilies, and ballerinas. In its day, the work was criticized for being sloppy, unprofessional , vulgar in technique with visible strokes, not much mixing of color, chaotic, lacking craft, etc, which may as well be Luke’s objections to “modern art”. Photography itself would take a while to be accepted as fine art. All the while the two continued to influence each other. Consider that photorealism was a post war counter movement to abstract art, but that it wouldn’t exist without either the embrace of abstraction or the widespread diffusion of photography and its idioms in society. Or think about Andy Warhol reproducing the objects of mass production in the setting of fine art. Such work only makes sense in a society that can print at will. This is Art having a conversation with the consequences of mass printing and the quotidian. Consider the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the techniques used by comic books, but blew them up and put the ben-day dots in the foreground, as if they are the subject. They are striking in person.
I seriously wonder if the author, or the people who levy these criticisms in general, have ever been to a museum. Liechtenstein’s pieces are big and experiencing them is different in person. Clifford Still made huge, abstract, minimal pieces that can only be appreciated in person (20’ wide). Pollock’s paintings are 10’ wide. Reproduction on a phone screen loses something as a medium. It’s not just the form factor, a work taking up your entire field of view, the setting, the loss of texture, etc, but our relationship to our phones themselves. In a museum, when forced to confront a work of art, you have an actual thing in front of you - it obviously took effort and other people value it and think you should value it too. They chose to show it to you and you implicitly accepted a contract when you entered to attempt to engage with it. A phone is just the opposite. Every image on a phone is disposable and ephemeral, and asks nothing of us.
Phones serve us pablum or turn everything else into it. So anyway, go to a museum. As your parents might say, eat your broccoli, you may like it.
crushedoranges
19hr ago
I'm sorry, this is where I break with libertarians. What exactly do you think gives courts and contracts their teeth? Violence and kidnapping. Or sovereignty, as it is more commonly known. A monopoly on violence.
Suppose me and a few hundred thousand people came together and formed a corporation with salaried employees with the duties of ruling over contractual disputes, dealing with petty crime, and all issues related to security, and everyone involved agreed to defer to this body in binding arbitration and forgo their right to banditry and warlordism.
That corporation is a state. Congratulations, you've recreated statism with extra steps.
Libertarians aren't prophets in the wilderness screaming about the injustice of collective violence. Yes, it is worth killing people and imprisoning people over. People for thousands of years have valued law and order over the Hobbsian war of all against all and people are greatly relieved to have left the tribal experience of feuds and wergild.
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
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