Remember that Trump used the entire SOUTHCOM to focus on Venezuela for months and 2 fleets to focus on Iran for a month (and likely for the next 6). There will likely be lots of “pieces moving on the board” if we are to actively participate in Cuba’s downfall (more than isolating them and cutting off their fuel imports).
You are pretending like it was inevitable that negotiations would fail and that Trump wouldn’t chicken out. Those are the likely alternatives in the betting market.
I would argue that Trump probably wouldn’t have felt confident enough to do this if he wasn’t already running on a high after the Venezuela war going so well for him.
The White House has admitted that Israel had actionable intelligence that several of the Iranian political leadership were having a physical meeting together and they decided to attack to decapitate the government. The US decided to attack Iranian capabilities preemptively to reduce the inevitable response to US military, embassies, and allies in the region.
It’s bad enough the politicians lied when they campaigned on no more wars in the Middle East, they don’t need to insult our intelligence with these moronic cover stories.
If they didn’t want Israel dragging the US into wars they could’ve just placed a call to Iran to warn them.
I see the White House adopting the strategy that the Russian and USSR government / state media use frequently: change the narrative early and often, to the point where people don’t feel like they can ever know the truth.
If your “ally” is, as this story goes, forcing you into a war against your will, protecting your own citizens and troops takes priority over any favors you might owe these “friends.”
Of course if you actually wanted to start this war, and wanted a low effort cover story, you’d…do exactly this kind of lazy, low effort lie.
What are you even calling a lie? (not the campaign promises, the recent statements) The claims are something like this, right?: 1. Israel decided to attack 2. The US thought about how that would play out. 3. The US decided to attack too.
Which of those claims is untrue? Is there a claim I missed?
"The US could have snitched to Iran" does not contradict any of those claims.
Also I'm not convinced that warning Iran would have made things much safer for US troops. And you can say what you want about what the US priorities should be, but that's a whole different discussion.
The US claim is that their attack is a sort of pre-emptive self-defense because Israel forced their hand. That’s what I’m calling a lie: Israel could’ve been dissuaded, trivially, if the US didn’t want to start a war with Iran.
Their hand was forced, and it was "a sort of pre-emptive self-defense". I'm still not seeing the lie. You think they should have done something different, but "should have done something different" is a completely different criticism.
And what you think is "trivial" is far from certain.
It’s an absolute howler that the United States would be led around by the nose by a country smaller than New Jersey. C’mon, man. You honestly believe that the massive military buildup that preceded this was just a wild coincidence?
If the Israelis were actually pushing the US around in the way we’re supposed to believe in this story the US would absolutely ruin them in a heartbeat. Netanyahu would be in prison in a timeframe measured in hours.
Pushing the US to make some kind of decision isn't the kind of "pushing around" that would make the US attack Israel. Your ideas of alternate ways for this to play out have gone from weird to absolutely ridiculous.
The US might have already decided it was going to attack, but it just as easily might not have.
It's plenty serious. You don't like how they acted and how they gave partial explanations so you're calling it an obvious lie even though it's not.
They didn't say it was their absolute only option or something like that, as far as I know. (If they did say that you needed to mention it.) That would have been a clear lie. Saying Israel moved first is just... plausible.
> I don't like having my intelligence insulted by such brazen falsehoods, so in that regard this is true.
Okay I guess I assumed you disliked the stuff you were calling a lie and a moronic cover story.
> I'm happy for your heroic amounts of credulity, it must make life a lot easier in this administration.
It's not that I'm being very credulous, it's that they said very little about their decision process. The claims you're objecting to are relatively minor details about the situation. You keep exaggerating the implications of their claims every time you say why they must be wrong.
We live in a post truth age, unfortunately. Many citizens are happy to only hew to the truth that they want, versus the "real" truth. (note the quotes -- truth is tricky).
There's a bitter irony in this issue -- toppling the regime in Iran would be a wonderful thing, but doing so via bombs is not the way. We have Afghanistan and Iraq as very dear lessons in how not to do it.
Absolutely, but the current administration is a whole new level of WTF. I've followed US politics for half a century and this feels like through the looking glass stuff.
This administration seems especially compromised, servile and obsequious. But you're right, both sides of the aisle have been successfully targeted for years. Both sides really don't want the unredacted files to come to light, but Trump least of all.
No they don’t. You are conflating “any” with “every”.
In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.
It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.
You act as though California is no longer one of the largest populations or one of the largest economies.
The “snowball fallacy” is a fallacy because there is no reason California s can’t swing the regulatory pendulum back the other direction if there is too much economy / freedom impacted.
When I took a machining course, the instructor sat in the corner and showed us YouTube videos in Mandarin with English subtitles to teach us the equipment.
You are making lots of projections from a single anecdote and conflating a state’s policies/economy with that of a country of 25x the population.
Detroit was once one of the US’s largest population cities, at nearly 2.5 million residents in the late 1960s, falling to less than 1 million by the 2010s. On this scale, California is still in the peak days of the 1960s, but we aren’t showing any current signs of shrinking. Maybe AI will be the catalyst for massive job losses, but that’s for the future to unfold.
Machining is a low value part of the economic supply chain, like sweat shop clothing. While I don’t want to lose it, it’s being dominated by countries (China, Taiwan) which are willing to throw MASSIVE money at the industry. TSMC was literally a whole-of-country effort to centralize the entire world’s supply chain of cutting edge semiconductors on one island. China is winning because they have cut-throat competition between companies and they don’t slow down for legal concerns such as regulation or intellectual property. That is only going to last for a certain amount of time before people will demand better living environments (which is partly why they have such a terrible fertility rate).
China probably caught up the same way starting 40 years ago. Watching VHS tapes in English (or German, Japanese, or French) with Mandarin subtitles*. Clearly "never" is untrue because it's been done once already.
IMO this is all cyclical.
* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.
Maps of California are dotted with SuperFund sites where these companies left the taxpayers with the bill to clean up their toxic messes. We don’t “foist” these externalities on other people; they choose to hold lower value on a clean environment than regions which regulate pollutants and other negative externalities.
All of the coverage of this is about the negotiation points of Anthropic vs Pentagon.
Anthropic doesn’t want their software used for certain purposes, so they maintain approval/denial of projects and actions. I suspect the Pentagon doesn’t want limitations AND they dislike paying for software/service which can be withheld from them if they are found to be skirting the contractual terms.
And THAT is why the Pentagon is using maximum leverage (threatening Anthropic as a supply chain risk label).
> Anthropic doesn’t want their software used for certain purposes
How do you know the government asked for a specific use case?
As far as I know, the meeting was private and we don't know what they talked about. I haven't found a single official press release or verified statement that supports this.
The verified statements I found are just about the government wanting unrestricted access. That alone is not enough to imply "no guardrails". As I mentioned before, it could be just for auditing (especially in the light of current events involving distilling of the models).
I think it's an extraordinary coincidence that this happened soon after the distillation thing. And I don't know what it means if it's not a coincidence.
The US federal government is no longer a good faith actor acting on behalf of American citizens and following US law, but now an autonomous corporation aiming to “get the best deal” via maximum leverage.
Dario Amodei used almost every single public interview he gave to press on the "Protect America, it's a matter of national security. Ban Chinese exports, etc".
He was clearly dancing to the DoD tune, like he REALLY wanted a DoD contract, which he eventually got.
But that's not the point. I'm talking about how coincidental all of this is with the recent Anthropic blunder with the distillation thing. That is my main point you dismissed.
