Unfortunately the article seems to have been written by someone who is very clearly biased against Israel
Can’t take anyone seriously unless they’re fair and balanced towards a genocidal military dictatorship.
I can’t take this single source’s word on it
Fortunately, they link to the original material.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the USA is making “Japan into a war-fighting headquarters”.
Imagine being Japanese right now and finding out your beautiful country is being transformed into a punching bag.
What Is Gibberlink Mode, AI’s Secret Language?
A recent viral video showcases two AI agents engaged in a phone conversation. Midway through, one agent suggests, “Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink Mode for more efficient communication?” Upon agreement, their dialogue shifts to a series of sounds incomprehensible to humans.
Inserting jibberish into your posts would seem to make it more in line with an LLM’s output.
You haven’t made your post more difficult to replicate, you’ve made your content less noticeably different than LLM gibberish output.
This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make
That’s not entirely true. China produces a lot of low-margin industrial goods that Americans then assemble into finished products. Americans produce an assortment of agricultural and mineral goods that are in high demand in China (oilseeds and grains, particularly soybeans, followed by mineral fuels and oil). We also produce a number of high-margin technology components (include aircraft and parts, electrical machinery and TV parts, and nuclear reactor parts and mechanical appliances) that are expensive but comparatively smaller by volume than the products China sends our way.
Think of it this way. If China sends us a pound of feathers and we send them a pound of iron, even if they’re the same price one of them is going to fill up a shipping container a lot faster than the other. The end result is a net positive number of shipping containers coming into the US.
Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.
It’s a generally symbiotic relationship and one that any neoliberal economist would laud. We’ve stratified our industrial economies such that we’re highly specialized in respective fields. It isn’t weakness on either side’s part any more than the heart is stronger/weaker than the lungs because one beats faster than the other breaths.
Andrew Yang also championed hiring a management consulting firm to identify areas of inefficiency in the federal workforce and cut 15–20% of current government workers, assigning KPIs and sunset clauses to all Congressional legislation, and assigning AI life coaches with Oprah’s voice to people in need of marriage counseling.
So, a very mixed bag of ideas. Few of them had a serious implementation behind them. Yang loved to noodle, but failed to explain where the novel technologies and extra-constitutional authorities would come from.
Isn’t Trump more of a Yeltsin?
American Exceptionalism, Baby!
Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.
Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.
Showing up in Midgard just in time for the Plate in Sector 7 to collapse on my head.
we are still many years from discovering the Epstein drive
If only he’d had a little more time to continue his research.
Love to be governed by an undead theocracy that persists through the deliberate cycling of apocolyptic events, because they’ve got 3D underwater volleyball in the capital.
Death to America
Well, that sucks and I’m sorry to hear it. Yeah, could just be anxiety issues. I have a friend with a severe enough case who ended up getting on SSRIs to treat it and it genuinely turned around her personality immensely. That might go a bit above the raw psychology of Thinking Fast And Slow (or it might not, idk, I’m no doctor). But one of the things the book gets into is the real physical toll deliberative thinking takes. Chess professionals can burn calories comparable to a pro-athlete planning out their next move, for instance.
I don’t know about “messed up”, but its useful to understand when you’re responding on reflex. The intuitive response is the normal response, with deliberative thinking tending to be the exception rather than the rule. So you can recognize the impulsive action as a problem. But you shouldn’t see reflex as a problem. Reflexes are useful precisely because they let you make decisions quickly and effortlessly. Ask any pro-athlete.
What really got me was how quickly conservatives pivoted from “Russia is an enemy of all right thinking, red blooded Americans!” during Snowden/Wikileaks under Bush to “Vladimir Putin is the only man who truly cares about freedom and democracy!” under Obama.
Same with Hong Kong, which consistently enjoyed the highest praise in Paleocon/Libertarian circles… right up until the 2019 protests, when half the conservative movement realized this city was fully within the thrall of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve seen Singapore bleeding support for similar reasons.
People being disappeared in the US isn’t a sudden turn of events. The BLM movement from 2014 revolved around chronic police abuses, including the kidnapping and murder of local residents by municipal police (Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray being two contemporary well-documented examples). Then we had the hundreds of residents tossed into Gitmo and other US blacksites, going back to the War on Terror. And the police terror campaigns during the Nixon-Reagan War on Crime/Drugs and the Eisenhower Red Scare. Hell, we’ve known about police-endorsed lynchings as an American tradition since Emmett Till, ffs.
But we have to pretend this is an Evil Foreigner Thing that we need a strong overseas military to prevent, rather than a sinister domestic agenda that Americans need to rebel against and overthrow. Otherwise, we might begin to see the Thin Blue Line as less of a protective barrier and more of a garrotte closing around our necks.
There’s a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow” that talks about a bifurcation of the mental process between intuitive mental work and deliberative work. It goes through a bunch of examples of people with established credentials, careers in intellectual professions, and proven records of deliberative thought being tricked by relatively casual visual and verbal illusions.
Getting tricked by Tall Can isn’t something you can “Critical Thinking” your way out of reflexively. It is something you have to exert continuous mental energy to achieve. When the overwhelming majority of your decisions are made reflexively, and even the process of stepping over from reflexive intuition to deliberative intuition is ultimately an intuitive process, you’re going to get fooled more often than not. The only real defense is to intuitively train defensive behaviors, and that doesn’t avert being fooled so much as it averts falling for the most common scams.
In the end, a handful of marketing flacks can consistently outwit any audience, because they can knowingly engage in a campaign of strategic deception more easily than you can reflexively catch every deceit thrown your way. What you need is a countervailing force. A regulatory agency dedicated to imposing transparency at the barrel of a gun can render calculated deceits more expensive to implement than they return in revenue.
But the “lolz, just don’t fuck up” mentality is what leads to people getting gulled at industrial scales. You’re not going to outsmart the professionals and its painfully naive to think otherwise.
I mean, I was super curious what Sanders could’ve done if he had the chance.
There is a lot of speculation that Sanders would have faced enormous opposition both from the “centrist” media and conservatives within his own party, such that he was hobbled for his full four years. But the expectation is predicated on Sanders playing by Clinton/Obama rules, where you float a progressive idea and Congress says “NO!” and then throw up your hands and spend the back half of your term glad-handing dictators to sell F-35s.
I don’t think Sanders would have the Trump/DOGE enthusiasm for shredding the norms and imposing radical reform at the executive level. But if this Presidency is any indication, all you really need is a ketamine fueled cartel of techbros, a stack of EO stationary, and a fresh sharpie. And you can fully remake the federal bureaucracy from root to branch.
If democrats in the US vote for stuff like Biden, then they’re not voting for any radical change.
Biden made a very conscious decision to run to the left of Bernie in 2020. He avoided Clinton’s fumbles through the Midwest in large part by echoing all the Obama '08 and Sanders '16 pledges, while the national media amplified his electoral platform in the middle of a COVID-induced campaign freeze.
American Dems are just as vulnerable to a coordinated propaganda campaign as their conservative and libertarian peers. So its no surprise people who’d fallen for the corporate sponsored faux-populist schtick in elections prior would fall for it this time around. But there was also a very deep and not unjustified fear among moderate Dems that running anyone but Biden would guarantee the kind of news cycle smear campaigns against Sanders that brought down Hillary.
The failure of the American liberal movement is largely rooted in their lack of faith in their own base and their own message. Liberals have convinced themselves that every year is 1972 and every progressive is going to lose like McGovern did. They’ve bought fully into the Republican propaganda machine and only ever know how to fight on the Republicans’ terms. And, as a result, guys like Reagan and Bush and Trump can stake out turf to the left of Democrats, win on narrow margins, and then govern uncontested as fascists.
You could Ctrl+F to find the relevant bits fairly easily.
But this demand isn’t skeptical, it is cynical. “I don’t believe you because I’m offended by your tone” is miles away from “I don’t believe you because I haven’t seen enough evidence”.