Honestly it seems like the only thing Trump's base cares about is the price of gasoline. They don't give a shit about what's actually happening in the war.
From the MAGA folks I know, they don't even care about the price of gasoline. That was when Biden was president. Now they have excuses. All they really seem to care about is whatever they're currently told to care about by the administration.
Trump has a loyal hardcore, but he is absolutely bleeding supporters around the edges. If you follow the US right many of them are pledging to vote democrat in the midterms as a protest.
I noticed a wave of that right as trump declared war (declared conflict, whatever), people going "I voted for no new wars," but I noticed on /r/conservative that the takes quickly gave way to sudden concern about Iran's nuclear capability as the propaganda mills got their fodder in order.
r/Conservative is, IMO, almost 100% guaranteed to be majority bots and the most hardcore admin apologists. They're a permanent safe space and often will delete even their own members' posts if they directly criticize the Leader.
Its only value is to see the desired responses from Fox News and the far-right media.
Who moderates /r/conservative? Whenever I drop into old subreddits these days the whole place feels very astro-turfed. High chance that it's modded by zionists, they have a lot of money and a lot of different organisations that hire full time people to "fight disinformation".
There is only one reason for us to give a damn about Israel other than religious fervor, and it's their technology and intelligence apparatus. They only care about us because we give them a lot of money and weapons, and apparently will follow them into their Leeroy Jenkins war and do the heavy lifting.
They're committing a genocide and now are ethnically cleansing Lebanon of Muslims under the cover of the Iran War. Their government is not worthy of support.
The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth.
You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes.
But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
> You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes
To be clear, there is zero historic evidence—going back to the Blitz—that strategic bombing has ever been able to do any of these things.
Except the one about choke points. That isn’t strategic. It’s tactical. And using artillery or airpower for shaping operations absolutely works.
> you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less
Agree. Fortunately, the MIC seems to have recognized this. None of it fundamentally changes the value of carriers. It just means they need to be defended differently from before. Sort of how you can’t sent lone carriers out into the ocean, they have to be escorted.
I agree with all of this except the notion that this is a recent change. Infantry being needed to seize and hold territory has been standard military doctrine around the world throughout history. Air power can tip the balance between opposing armies but has never been enough to settle a war alone. I'm confident that every person working in the Pentagon is aware of all this, aside from the SecDef.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
I treat people who blindly believe an LLM the same way I treat people who blindly believe a religion or a political ideology or medical advice from Instagram.
If they ask what I think, I tell them.
If they don't want my opinion I keep it to myself.
Just like the rules say it's uninteresting and off-topic to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, it's equally uninteresting and off-topic to accuse posters of AI crimes.
And everyone's personal AI detector has a ridiculously high false-positive rate.
I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Franco at this point.
Does everyone just easily accuse genuine, literate humans of "cheating" with AI when there's no way they could know that?
There are a lot of unique aspects of the writing in this post that LLMs don't typically generate on their own.
And there's not a "delve" or "tapestry" or even a bullet point to be found.
Also, accusations and complaints like this are off-topic and uninteresting.
We should be talking about filesystems here, not your gut instinct AI detector that has a sky-high false-positive rate.
I swear there needs to be some convention around throwing wild accusations at people you don't know based exclusively on vibes and with zero actual evidence.
That would be amazing! In the moment, it's a lot of noise, but say you're trying to figure out a bit of code that Greg wrote four years ago and oh btw he's no longer with the company. Having access to his emails and slack would be amazing context to try reverse engineer and figure out whytf he did what he did. Did he just pick a thing and run with it, so I can replace it and not worry about it, or was it a very intentional choice and do not replace, because everything else will break?
No. It really only binds the corporation, but it does hold the executives/directors personally responsible for compliance so they’d be under a lot of pressure to figure out how to fix enough leaks in the ship to keep it afloat. Any individual director/executive could quit with little issue, but if they all did in a way that compromised the corporations ability to function, the courts could potentially utilize injunctions/fines/jail time to compel compliance from corporate leaders.
Also there’s probably a way to abuse the Taft-Hawley act beyond current recognition to force the employees to stay by designating any en-masse quitting to be a “strike / walk off / collective action”. The consequences to the individuals for this is unclear - the act really focuses on punishing the union rather than the employees. It would take some very creative maneuvering to do anything beyond denying unemployment benefits and telling the other big AI companies (Google / ChatGPT / xAI) to blacklist them. And probably using any semi-relevant three letter agency to make them regret their choice and deliver a chilling effect to anyone else thinking of leaving (FBI, DHS, IRS, SEC all come to mind).
If the administration could figure out how to nationalize the company (like replace the leadership with ideologically-aligned directors who sell it to the government) then any now-federal-employees declared to be quitting as part of a collective action could be fined $1,000 per day or incarcerated for up to one year.
It’s worth noting that this thesis would get an F grade at any accredited law school. Forcing people to work is a violation of the 13th amendment. But interpretations of the constitution and federal law are very dynamic these days so who knows.
The thesis could get an F at law school, but it is not guaranteed that the government will act lawfully. Its useful to think about what the administration can do, legal or not, especially when given little challenge when acting illegally.
Maybe Anthropic could replace its employees with AI. Unlikely the admin is going to enjoy setting precedent that employees are protected against being replaced by AI.
The real issue is if Trump and Hegseth will create fake wars to nationalize a private corporation, they’ll definitely declare wars to extend the presidency.
Once a war has started, it won't be fake any more.
> they’ll definitely declare wars to extend the presidency.
You don't exchange the Fraudster in Chief while at war, so they do want a war. Any war. But I have the strange impression that von Clownstick doesn't want to be seen as having started it by himself.
FDR's tenure might have created an amendment to that effect, but it's not like this administration hasn't used a legal loophole before.
Perhaps there's a war, that a misguided congress won't declare as such, and a certain vice president that runs for president, with a certain someone as his vice president...
Specifically section on martial law in wartime context. It’s not very clear but I just feel like the norms and laws will be stretched or broken, as the administration has already done numerous times.
What would happen if he tried by not vacating at the end of his term, when challenged in court, shut down by his own Supreme Court? I mean let’s be real, all it really takes is him not giving up the white house. I sometimes wonder.
Steve Bannon advised Trump to do this in 2020. Question is what would the Secret Service and Pentagon do once the election is certified for the winning candidate? If their loyalty remains to the Constitution, Trump would be forcibly removed.
We went through this when it looked like he might not leave last time. What happens is the Marines show up and politely throw his ass to the curb.
You do not under any circumstances gotta hand it to the American military but they do seem unwilling to play a role in Trump's let's say extraconstitutional ambitions. At least a junta doesn't seem likely. Without the military behind him he's just a senile old pedophile. What's he going to do, lock himself into the Oval Office?
The military is the one drone striking boats in the Caribbean. The military invaded a foreign country we are not at war with to kidnap its leader. The military dropped bombs on a foreign country we are not at war with. The military is patrolling the streets of DC and other cities. The military is the one spending the money on new immigrant detention centers. I fail to see how they are standing up to Trump's illegal acts. I'm not 100% sure the White House Marines will just throw Trump to the curb if Congress manages to certify the election in favor of someone else.
The military drone striked civilians in Obama's day, they did Abu Ghraib and Agent Orange and countless other war crimes. But aiding a President in a coup would be beyond the pale. Maybe I'm being naive, but I do think a lot of soldiers would refuse to do that even if they could contextualize and compartmentalize everything else.
Those are things the military wanted to do anyway, Trump just enabled them.
But violating the constitution with such a blatant power grab, and thus throwing the future of the United States and its military into uncertainty, is probably not something they want. Better to just force Trump out and maintain the status quo of new presidents every 4-8 years.
The war machine is already rewriting this as Iranian hostility.
The base is incapable of seeing this as a failure of their cult leader.
Instead they'll see it as the very rationale and justification of the war.
If they were ambivalent about it before, now they'll scream bloody murder for even more off-the-leash barbarism from the US and Israel.
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