I've been seeing more and more talk of how global opinions of the US have really taken a hit in the last year. With that in mind, do y'all think as quickly as it went down it can recover?
It can recover fast, but it will take a long time to recover fully. Even if the next administration is more...sane and stable, when you go back to the negotiating table around the world the other parties will be wary of future US administrations that are as bad or worse than Trump's. Why trust your word on things, why even trust any new legally binding international obligations, when they may just get trampled in the next few years? I think this will be lessened if Trump only has a single term ("oh, they recognized the mistake and corrected") vs a second term ("oh no, there is wide spread support for his behaviour and future administrations can tap into that sentiment to gain power") will dictate how America is viewed by other governments and who is willing to still play ball instead of starting a new game without you.
As a western European, most of it is associated with the current president and administration. Almost every European liked Obama and supported his international leadership.
I think it's fair to say that Obama was much more trusted in Europe than either Bush or Trump. When you break it down by country the story is more complex, but the poster did admit to being western European.
My own experience is that nobody cared about Obama (and the ones that came before him) but the media are trying their hardest to report any negative news about Trump.
Yes. The US has always been a little 'special' in the club ob western nations, in many respects. That was always cause for a certain level of mistrust, which is actually healthy. But in the broad, I would say the general perception amoung the other western nations was still overall positive. Now some (by far not all) aspects on the 'plus' side have been put in question, while on the 'minus' side, not a lot improved. But I don't see it so black and white. Another leader or even Trump himself could turn it around, if they were interested.
The breakdown of the (hidden) alliance the US media had with American politics to now open hostility could make that harder, because it is visible worldwide. Again, the media could turn it around, if it wanted to. But it feels unlikely, they will with Trump. So the best chance for reconciliation between the fourth power and the government is a democratic win in the upcoming election.
Fair or not fair, it seems from an outside perspective that if Trump wins again, all hell could break lose in the US. There could be a civil war anarchy vs. authority.
I think there are some things amoung Trumps policies, that if people were a little more honest have been attractive even to the left of some or even most of the other western nations, like putting more value on local labor.
The problem is less about opinions and more a concern that a 'lapse' on US part to care for democracy and freedom worldwide (even if it might not always have been genuine in the past either), openly speaking more positive about some more authoritarian leaders than democratic leaders, etc. could have the more long lasting negative effect on the world.
Ultimately everything is about results. World leaders would be happy to ignore Trumps behavior if everything was under control. Unfortunately everything clearly is not under control.
Realistically, the US should not be debating whether its response was the worst in the world, or merely e.g. the 10th worst in the world. Both are shocking outcomes for such a highly-developed economy.
The US has, for the most part, extensive resources with which a global pandemic can be managed. It has money, people, manufacturing capability, research centres, and medical facilities. But the country has catastrophically mismanaged this challenge, and this is almost entirely for political reasons. Over 100k people are dead – it's a bad outcome, and we should be looking at why that bad outcome happened and what can be done to fix it.
I live in the UK – another country which has also badly mismanaged this pandemic. The reasons are a little bit different, but it does seem pretty startlingly obvious to be that the underlying problem is the same – you cannot solve a real-world problem by pretending it does not exist. The UK failed its response because it spent too much time on political management and lying to itself, and not enough time on dealing with problems and being honest about them. The same applies to the US, and it's honestly absolutely breathtaking the number of perspectives I have seen that want to apologise for this.
The U.S. currently ranks #12 out of 200 in terms of infections per capita, far higher than any western democracy--even those that have done significantly more testing per capita. Yes, it is pretty close to the worst response in the world: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Countries with more deaths per capita than the US, in order:
Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden, France
At the rate we're going, that may change eventually, but when you compare the general discussion of, say, the US vs. Sweden, it's obvious there is an absurd amount of bias, both from the US domestic media and others.
I think people are too judgmental. My point is just that people are biased about the facts, not that I accept the underlying belief that a lower death rate means virtue or intelligence.
This is 95% the media, and 5% actual change. And 50% trump saying stupid things.
Basically: The US has not actually changed, but the Media really really really hates Trump, and Trump really knows how to say stupid things, which gives them lots of ammo.
They would do well to ignore most of what he says, but they can't help it: He sells lots of clicks.
Out here in the real world the US is not actually doing bad, the US response to the virus is not actually really bad (it's inline with other countries see: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality ).
This is basically just media desperate for clicks to sell ads. And they don't care about the collateral damage. (See my other post in this thread for more details about how this NYT article is a perfect example of the media badly representing things.)
Only 8 countries in the world have a worse value than the US for per capita deaths. That's the data you're providing to support your statement that we're not doing badly? Should a country this rich be ranked at the bottom of the world in mortality?
" They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) "
This is the third time I've read this in the comments but I can't seem to find any info on "shoot to incapacitate" online. I'm not doubting it, I'm just looking to collect information regarding the topic to share with others. Do you have anything to corroborate this training method?
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_... This page is a good intro if you use Google Translate. The main keyword is "Final and Fatal Shot" (Finaler Rettungsschuss) which is what the police is trained for to only use as a last resort and gets schooled on when it's legally acceptable.
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finaler_Rettungsschuss> Details this a bit better; most shots fired by the german police aim to incapacitate an opponent or are fired in a perceived or real emergency situation, the prevention of crimes and prevention of getaway.
The difference between the mentioned cases and the "final and fatal shot" is that the later is used by the police officer with the express and only intent to kill. There are various requirements, mainly that it must be the only viable way to prevent lethal or extensive harm to others.
Please note that the english pages are not as extensive or talk about the US situation so they're less useful.
From top of my head, what I was told from officers (my dad and others), police isn't conditioned to ai I'm for the center of mass. They rather aim for the legs and such. SWAT being an exception, of course, depending on circumstances.
It is still shooting at people, so potentially deadly. But less so than putting 6 bullets into someone's chest.
"...but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work."
I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?
"Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?"
Most armed folks are taught that when you draw a gun it's to neutralize a threat. To neutralize is to completely eliminate the threat.
Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license?
Something like 'Don't pull your gun out and point it at someone unless you intend to shoot and kill them. Anything less than that needlessly escalates the severity of a situation by introducing a weapon.'
The idea being that if you pull out a gun and don't use it, all of the sudden you have increased the potential for violence, exposed yourself as armed and willing, lost the element of surprise, and given potential assailants the idea/opportunity to match your use of force. Thus, "shoot to kill."
One problem is that guns are tools for a task, and when you pull out a tool, you want to leverage it as efficiently as possible. Maybe the answer isn't to use the tool differently, but use a different tool entirely.
Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license?
Absolutely, I was taught this in my self-defense shooting class. The question of kill or not kill doesn't enter into it at all. We were trained to neutralize the threat, full stop. The effect on the future health of that threat doesn't enter into it.
And this makes sense when you understand that gunfights don't happen the way you see on TV. There, when someone is hit with a bullet they fall down and stop being a threat. This is not how the world works. In the real world, unless their circulatory system or nervous system is taken offline, they will continue to be a threat. Even if they've been hit through the aorta or femoral artery or something that is likely to be fatal, it'll take a minute or two at least for the effect to occur, and in the meantime, they're going to keep trying to kill you.
Are we talking war combat here? Because in a civilian case shooting legs and taking cover might just as well do it.
The real reason they shoot to kill is because they don’t want the victim to sue. A dead man never sued, their families have a lower chance of getting anything though that has started to change with so much footage.
No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs).
Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing.
|Ethics isn't based on what causes suffering / well-being.
Ehh, where we've landed in contemporary, normative-esque based ethics, it kind of is. Where you think ethics gets its imperative force depends largely (as you mentioned) on your community and environment. Western philosophy has however been shaped enough by utilitarianism, consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc., to the point that they all to a degree recognize suffering and/or the need to reduce it.
Peter Singer's summary of WH Leckly's 'ever expanding circle of responsibility' is a good example of this.
'"...Lecky wrote of human concern as an expanding circle which begins with the individual, then embraces the family and ‘soon the circle... includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man [sic] with the animal world."' -- https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/199704--.htm
Singer suggests that "Our century is the first in which it has been possible to speak of global responsibility and a global community." If an ever expanding circle of responsibility includes reducing suffering on a global level-- and sentience being the compelling criteria that it is-- including animal suffering vs. human culinary pleasure/preference will definitely continue to be relevant in any ethical/philosophic discussions moving forward.
It's interesting that one of the logical ends to reducing suffering as much as possible ultimately leads to expanding the circle of responsibility to future generation and those not yet alive to even suffer. This is where environmentalism and regard for those ahead of our decisions comes into play.
Maybe you're right that ethics isn't entirely based on suffering / well-being, but that's largely where it is headed.
Out of curiosity what do you mean by this? Are you referring to all Multicast solutions? Can I just be specific -- what do you think of Dante, Audio/Video-over-IP or other time sensitive an synced services that use Multicast?
Isn't plain old UDP already an unstoppable DDOS tool? Multicast doesn't make it that much harder to stop. In fact using it as a DDOS tool seems a bit problematic since the victim would need to join the groups to receive the traffic. Yes a piece of malware on the victim's computer could go and attempt to join every single multicast source on the internet, but it's a self correcting problem since they wouldn't be able to maintain their subscriptions with their link totally saturated. Much easier to stop than normal DDOS attacks.
The problem is that we have never figured out a multicast routing solution that would work at Internet scale. Especially one that can be implemented in hardware on routers.
> we have never figured out a multicast routing solution that would work at Internet scale
Sure we did, it's called bittorrent. Ok, it isn't really multicast and you probably have to sacrifice ordered delivery, but for many of the use-cases where multiple-delivery would have been a good idea, bittorrent has proven to be a very successful "minimum viable multicast".
Bittorrent succeeded while decades of "multicast" research/experiments failed because bittorrent realized the multi-delivery problem was really about managing peers, which isn't solvable at layer-3.
edit: by which I mean: previous attempts at multicasting assumed it was a packet routing problem, when peer management is actually a question for the application layer.
Bittorrent is the opposite of multicast. Instead of aggregating the data into a single channel to save bandwidth, we instead split it up across every single recipient in a huge NxN graph.
This also illustrates the other problem with multicast on the Internet: It's mostly saving bandwidth on the backbone and at the server. The backbone has plenty of bandwidth to spare, and servers are often in data centers these days where bandwidth is not a huge concern.
The use case where someone does video production in their basement and broadcasts it out to millions of people across the internet over their home cable modem connection is just not compelling enough for ISPs and the backbone providers to make Multicast happen. Just put it on Youtube and let Google sort it out.
hmm. Multicast is often used for, like, IPTV. That's a very different task from BitTorrent. Torrents are indeed about managing peers. IPTV is centralized, not p2p, the benefit of multicast for IPTV is that the routers in between the source (ISP) and your client only carry one copy of the stream instead of one stream per client.
At internet scale.. well, it would be nice to have this efficiency for Twitch and YouTube Live. Which are also pretty centralized (CDN) so I don't see how this is about managing peers.
Bittorrent has a P2P streaming protocol called Bittorrent Live which was used to operate a TV service for several years but I have no idea how efficient it is compared to IPTV multicasting or central servers+CDN.
How exactly? Sources have to pass RPF check following ucast path and receivers have to follow the path either to RP or source, or the packets don't get there.
It's also, effectively, a promise to maintain Internet-wide routing table entries for every page on the web rather than every host (which is something we also can't really do today).
Multicast for everything is difficult. But would it be all that difficult to have 100k or 1M entries?
Something that would definitely be doable today is an IP header that stores 25 or 50 extra destination addresses. But it seems like nobody really cares. Just make streaming services send out a thousand packets with identical data.
Well, it could be done based on microtransactions. To set up your mcast tree you need to pay. The slots are auctioned off every X minutes on a DAG-chain-block-thing.
Yuck. I read HN to avoid these kind of low effort canned responses.