This seems like a hollow victory. "No signal" will quite soon become a vanishing minority of users, and websites will simply reject anybody that isn't providing the signal. These laws mostly just prime the pump to get the corpos over the activation energy of coordinating a conspiracy to make browsers start doing this on their own.
I'm not an attorney and haven't read these laws, but here is an interesting question: if Linux is exempt from legally needing to supply a user's age for verification, but websites require an age to be presented as a condition of access, can browser developers on Linux send a pre-programmed age for interoperability purposes and be legally in the clear? It seems legit to me.
Of course, since the whole point of these laws is to absolve Faceboot (the laws' sponsor) of liability, Faceboot (et al) will then move on to demanding remote attestation to make sure users are on proprietary operating systems that are legally required to send a faithful signal.
I do wonder if there is an angle here for pushing back against the ever-growing surveillance industry. What if instead of sidestepping the age requirement by choosing an "old enough" age, we chose "too young" ages instead. A signal saying "I am 12" and all the COPPA requirements start to apply, including to embedded ads. Probably easy enough for most sites to flat out reject access. But some sites can't / won't - think government sites that currently embed corpo-surveillance crap like recaptcha etc, or sites that serve neutral content and don't care themselves but use cloudflare. Or perhaps browser extensions could even mix and match which signals they send where - "over 13/18" to the main site, "under 13" to the subresources, etc? I suppose by the time you've gotten there you might as well just be running best-in-class adblock extensions that work based on lists of hostile sites. But I think there might still be a core of an interesting aspect to a well-known way of telling websites that you're under 13.
I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.
Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.
Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.
There is a difference between failing to condemn something and gloating/supporting attacks on liberty simply because one's favored political team is now doing it.
Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
As I said to your first comment: positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).
Can you elaborate? The positive argument being that the law and judiciary disagree with you? The court decisions was 15 years ago when Obama was president btw.
I fully elaborated in the other comment, which you didn't respond to. There is a sibling reply that is on point as well. And sorry no, "Obama is responsible too" has no purchase with me.
Their infrastructure and services were used in domestic terrorist attacks on pregnancy centers in the United States, by the CHAZ operation in which two black teenagers were lynched, attempts to crash police helicopters, attempts to burn police officers alive.
Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
Basing an argument around the unavoidable physical embodiment of speech is sophistry. There is no "above". The "material support" you speak of is all just republishing speech.
By the argument laid out by the government here, merely reading writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.
The current United States government is very keen on pushing the idea that there is a vast and shadowy international left-wing conspiracy waging war on it.
I support PKK because I run an IPFS node and I'm sure at least one person connected to PKK has uploaded at least one thing to IPFS at least one time. What's with you and your obsession with PKK? You probably support them too through some equally convoluted mechanism, but you're all over this thread saying anyone with any connection must be terminated.
I know that st least one person connected to the PKK used IPFS at least one time. So it's knowing. And it's material support as shown by the a/i allegation.
Google says the Chinese military budget is 281 billion. They probably get lower cost labor and production, but that’s significantly lower than the United States.
Adjusting for Purchasing Parity, an imperfect measure, that still only like 600 billion, significantly lower than the United States.
Vertical integration is an interesting claim, because we have been told that the government outsourcing to private companies is more efficient due to competition than the government doing the work themselves.
It depends on the vertical. If you're outsourcing a sixth-generation fighter jet or an aircraft carrier, your options are fewer than if you're outsourcing building construction or office supplies. You don't want to trust your nuclear-powered supercarrier to Joe's Boat Emporium.
brother we're not discreet about it, the US is a stain on the world and the world would be more stable and better off if it disappeared, it is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world. It's not a deep, hidden conspiracy.
It also turns out that only one side of these two has the means to wage war and is also the biggest arms dealer in the world. Bully gets called mean names, boo hoo :(
We didn't start World War 1, or World War 2, or the Korean war, or the Vietnam war. We didn't make Russia attack Ukraine. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran or Kuwait. We didn't make Iran fund terrorism around the region and the world.
We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.
What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.
Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.
Maybe read how de Gaulle viewed the US "promoting peace in Europe" or how the British did after the US stole the Suez canal and kicked the British out of the Middle East.
Yes, after Saddam invaded Iran, because Iran was trying to export its revolution to Iraq. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran though. It was just one more war caused by Iran exporting revolution which has happened several times in the Middle East already.
It was an opportunity to weaken Iran which is a far worse problem in the Middle East than Iraq was. Iran had fired most of its airforce pilots for not being Islamic radical enough and with their airforce in shambles, Saddam saw an opportunity. Then Iran had to rush to rehire their old airforce pilots regardless of their dedication to the revolutionary cause or regime just to fight back.
That wasn't the question you asked. The question you asked was about a couple decades later. When we helped overthrow the previous leader, it was because the fear was that he was establishing communism in Iran. He was unelected, removing the actual elected representatives and undermining the Shah. Of course after removing him, the Shah ended up not being much better, but can't win'em all.
The spark that caused the whole thing as far as I understand, is that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil which kept upsetting the population until they wanted something to be done. This probably gave communists an opportunity to come in, nationalize the oil and be the saviors, before then simply becoming the new oppressors of the population.
I don't think anybody was a hero, just Brits, Russians and the US strategizing around a country that seemed lost.
It really wasn't, but in either case your answer takes us back to the original point being made...
> it [the US] is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world
These aren't independent events. Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries, the echoes winds up being worse, with a very, very limited number of exceptions.
> but can't win'em all.
We barely win any of them, but if your attention span is only a single generation, then I can see how you might fail to notice.
> Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries
The US isn't an empire. Is Germany a US territory? Is Japan a US territory? Is Iraq? No. Is Panama? No. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are happily part of the US. We don't have to use military force or economic leverage to keep them part of the US. If the US government was destroyed, we would recreate it, because it is good.
The US also championed natural rights globally, which recognizes that people have rights that are not derived from any government, but are inherent. Guess which countries reject this? China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and others.
> We barely win any of them
Winning depends on what you wanted to achieve. We don't need to win, we just need to get what we want. Our military won in Vietnam, but when conflict started again the government voted not to get involved. The Vietnamese love the US and hate China. South Koreans love the US. North Korea's leader loves the US and hates China. Japan loves the US and hates China. Saddam Hussein was killed in Iraq and we established forward bases to use against Iran. Afghanistan hates Iran. Osama bin Laden was killed. European countries and most Middle Eastern and most Asian countries are friendly with the US.
Everyone seems to recognize how Russia, Iran and China align. Our allies are getting stronger, because we're giving them tough love, while Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Iran are all getting weaker.
You can interpret all of that however you'd like, but it doesn't sound like losing. People can delude themselves all they want and the media can yell from the top of the trees how everything is awful and we're losing and so on, but reality gets a vote. Don't let other people tell you what is real. Figure it out yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
>Vietnam war
Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
>Korean War
True, not your fault, you just bombed an entire country into non existence.
>Iraq attack Iran
Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
>Iran
You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
>We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO
Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
> We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East
By spending hundreds of billions on a country that, since its inception, has continuously been at war, an aggressor, colonizing, genocidal theocracy? Working out GREAT.
>What country is it that you're defending
Watch out, your paranoia is seeping through. The US is a net negative to world peace is the only thing that was said.
>Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
While none of those countries are angels, and a lot of them are also victims of political power plays outside of their own control (hint: it involves the US being so violently anti-communist that it would rather raze a country to the ground rather than see its hegemony ever so slightly threatened), I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice. It's really hard to catch up to the US on the scale of atrocities committed.
I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
>[free speech word vomit]
I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
> Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical. Comintern was aiming to conquer the Earth with global communism. It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2. The Soviet Union has caused more death on this planet as a result of its communist expansion threat than any other country in history. So yes, we are anti-communist. And you should be too.
> Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
It was largely symbolic and demonstrative. Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using. There wasn't any guarantee Japan was going to surrender and you have the benefit of being in the future, which they did not. You should also try understanding what Japan was doing to other countries. It was horrific in every sense. They had to be stopped by any means. You could argue part of the strategy of using the nukes to end the war early was to pre-empt the Russians gaining ground in Japan and getting stuck with a second communist split like in Germany. That concern was certainly validated by Russia's push for Korea decades later. Korea would have been fine without Russia trying to gain communist control there.
> Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
Countries do all kinds of things to achieve their strategic aims, the US isn't remotely unique in that regard. Still, we didn't encourage him to invade Iran and we only supported him when he started losing to prevent Iran expanding into Iraq.
> You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
It was more complicated than that. Britain was taking advantage of Iran and Russia was trying to establish communism in Iran. The new leader was essentially getting rid of elected members of government and becoming a dictator. It wasn't a good situation to start with and the US didn't want Russia to establish communism there. Even decades later when the revolutionaries took over, the communists helped them overthrow the government and then the revolutionaries executed the communists. If everyone had left Iran alone, we probably wouldn't have gotten involved.
> Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
Peace in Europe does not exist because of the EU. The US formed NATO with the European countries. That established a mutual defense agreement so if anyone attacked anyone else, everyone would join in and defend.
> I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice.
I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes. Far more people died from other weapons than nukes and the US has done more to prevent the proliferation of nukes than any other country. Nuking Japan also wasn't a single country decision. Multiple countries had to agree to it, because of what Japan was doing. Nobody is going to use nukes today unless they want to end their country.
> I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
You can't change the whole world at once and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. That's a communist thing. There are monarchies and dictatorships that are largely tolerable, like Singapore. Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something. I can't know every strategic plan we've ever had or why we had it.
> I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
The US dollar, defense agreements, preserving international waterway navigation and aggressively pushing back against communism has done far more to improve the stability of countries than any time in history. The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
I think you have your feelings way too invested into your opinions. If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind, but I don't think the same could be said about you. If you don't have the freedom to change your mind, then you'll stagnate.
> Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical.
McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
> It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2
I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
> Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using.
How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal. Rockets weren't even in use, yet, because the V2 only came out during WWII. So, no ICBMs. At best, there was the rail gun that Germany was developing but that was a "their" weapon and not an "our" weapon.
> The US formed NATO with the European countries.
Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
> I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes.
Ok, Agent Orange? People are still dying from cancer, to this day, from that.
> Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something.
You're so close to getting it... "it'll be conditioned on something" is the pivotal point: As long you get what you want(ed), consequences be damned. Iran-Contra comes to mind, here.
> The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
> If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind
Everything in your statements seems to be bathed in American Exceptionalism and I'm doubting that anyone could change your mind.
> McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
It worked out fine?
> I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
Many communists were armed and had guns, aiming to take over every country on Earth. The US, Japan and Germany were fighting back against them in China, Spain and Germany.
> How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal.
I figure objectively. Far more Japanese were killed by fire bombings, which could be done extensively, at scale, with impunity. Nukes were important and consequential, but if the goal was simply to kill Japanese or destroy strategic targets then we already had that problem well solved.
Japan had thoroughly spread propaganda of racial superiority and being divinely chosen. One of the benefits of dropping a nuke compared to fire bombing, is that it immediately leaves a humbling impression.
> Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
The US created the League of Nations, which was the first known collective security organization like that to prevent a repeat of World War 1. Ironically, the idea came from a German. World War 2 demonstrated that Europeans weren't prepared to defend each other.
The Western Union was mostly an attempt to demonstrate to the US that European countries were now ready to defend each other, rather than failing. This is relevant right now, because there are concerns that Putin wants to test NATO to see if their resolve collapses the same way it did during World War 2 under the League of Nations. In order for NATO to be formed, the US had to be convinced that European countries could be active participants rather than passive consumers of defense guarantees, which is also again relevant since we've been pushing harder for European countries to meet their defense spending commitments.
> Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
People actually traded in other currencies for USD rather than ditching it after 2008.
>>McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
>It worked out fine?
Please stop giving people ammo to take the piss out of you, it really shows how ignorant you are. Although it's very fun to find a blind exceptionalist in the wild and to make fun of it: every single one of your answers has been a demonstration of how the US likes to act with impunity and pretend you have a mission of divine importance. From saying you have a "duty" to stall communism, to willingly destroying other countries for your own benefit, you remain a perfect example of why the world is better off with the US gone.
PS: if you want to count deaths from famines as "caused by the communists", whether it was the USSR or the great leap forward, at least have the decency of admitting that these countries were suffering from famines for centuries beforehand, and that they were the last famines they ever lived through at this point. Communism stopped those famines. The US is perfectly happy to let a few dozen million die every year of famines, lack of access to medication, clean water, all things it has in large amounts and refuses to give because "it's not profitable". War profiteers, murderers and dangers to the world.
We've got a billionaire funded conspiracy openly ignoring the Constitution, wantonly trashing our American liberties, and yet you're still raging about "communist billionaires" ?
The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.
The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!
How can you say freedom of speech is improving when the government has just declared a blog hosting service to be terrorists because of the speech of the blogs hosted there? Is this satire?
> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
> The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy?
Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.
The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.
China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.
The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.
I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.
> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?
Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.
Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.
What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.
> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.
If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.
I was hoping to hear from CMay who sends very knowledgeable about billionaire communists, but ok. Is it just the one or are there other communist billionaires?
That die has already been cast. It's stop everything versus "accelerationism" full speed ahead. Both sides will point to how their full world view is coherent and would have sensible results, and will blame the other side for the problems from their own agenda not being allowed to go far enough. The former will succeed at when pushing regulations that merely constitute speed bumps for the big players but hamstring individuals and small businesses, and the latter will succeed at pushing for little government restrictions on the regulated sandboxes of the big players. Regulatory capture complete.
I had a terrifying thought while mowing the lawn today that we don't even have an inkling of a feel for how imaginary property laws are going to destroy the usefulness of hosted LLMs for individuals. Ask Claude Jr the easiset way to attach some mechanical actuators to your lawnmower and to write some software, and it's going to respond "sorry, automated lawnmowing runs afoul of patents X, Y, and Z. Please upload your patent license certificates". With LLMs we're currently at the stage where Google used to reliably return good links to cracks/warez/etc, and as we all know that's been thoroughly locked down.
As a centrist libertarian, I would say the dynamic is better framed in that authoritarians are frequently attracted to libertarianism as a way of cloaking and justifying their true beliefs, to both themselves and others. So called "right" libertarianism is rife with this, as it emphasizes a fallacious axiomatic conception of rights which are to be overtly rejected when the logical preconditions have not been met. This captures essentially all of the Surveillance Valley hucksters claiming to be "libertarians" - rights for me, not for thee.
A nice sentiment, though I think perception of a thing ends up being more important than the specifics. No doubt the actions can be used to support the marketing vision, though.
The problem is that perception can only carry things so far. Surveillance Valley had been coasting on unjustifiable positive perceptions while continuing to build their digital cages. The jig is up, and it's a long way down.
If that were seriously on the table, we could have just used the proceeds from having the world reserve currency to do that. Instead, their open plan for that national asset is to squander it.
In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist.
I don't think that really changes my interpretation? There is an all-too-common dynamic of people working overtime to connect actions the administration is doing with what could be a sensible plan.
If that was not your intent, then please don't take it personally.
From what I understand having the dollar be our main export is a reason why we haven’t had real industrial policy. We export dollars so we have to buy from overseas.
You're missing the other choices that link those two things. Being able to export dollars lets the government create new dollars out of thin air, which can be traded for real goods and services - a great deal by any measure. But the political mantra of the last thirty years has been a fake "fiscal responsibility" where the government has been stopped from spending that new money for most deliberate purposes, especially on a large scale (eg subsidizing domestic manufacturing in strategic industries). Yet instead of the natural price deflation that true fiscal responsibility would have brought, economists have declared that our currency still needs to inflate. And so the Fed still creates just as many new dollars, but instead gives them away to banks in the form of low interest loans (fueling the ever growing asset bubble, essentially a handout to asset holders). The combination of all of these are what has decimated our industrial base.
Don't bother. "woke/marxist crap" is an obvious tell that they're delusional from a Facebook feed or similar. They will have plenty of examples because it obviously does exist, but it's ultimately just a strawman without much sway over the larger Democratic party - especially in the current context of how Republicans have gone all-in for con artist in chief and are currently running the show. As a centrist libertarian who had never in my life voted for a major party in a national election until 2020, I'm holding my nose and voting conservative (ie democrat) for the foreseeable future.
I'm not an attorney and haven't read these laws, but here is an interesting question: if Linux is exempt from legally needing to supply a user's age for verification, but websites require an age to be presented as a condition of access, can browser developers on Linux send a pre-programmed age for interoperability purposes and be legally in the clear? It seems legit to me.
Of course, since the whole point of these laws is to absolve Faceboot (the laws' sponsor) of liability, Faceboot (et al) will then move on to demanding remote attestation to make sure users are on proprietary operating systems that are legally required to send a faithful signal.
I do wonder if there is an angle here for pushing back against the ever-growing surveillance industry. What if instead of sidestepping the age requirement by choosing an "old enough" age, we chose "too young" ages instead. A signal saying "I am 12" and all the COPPA requirements start to apply, including to embedded ads. Probably easy enough for most sites to flat out reject access. But some sites can't / won't - think government sites that currently embed corpo-surveillance crap like recaptcha etc, or sites that serve neutral content and don't care themselves but use cloudflare. Or perhaps browser extensions could even mix and match which signals they send where - "over 13/18" to the main site, "under 13" to the subresources, etc? I suppose by the time you've gotten there you might as well just be running best-in-class adblock extensions that work based on lists of hostile sites. But I think there might still be a core of an interesting aspect to a well-known way of telling websites that you're under 13.
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