And it amazes me how many people can't seem to see past the "US is good, everyone else are bad" smoke mirror.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Second- aside from the specifics of this post, you don't have to believe that the US is good to see the logic of export controls. There are a number of countries that are openly hostile to the US (Iran and North Korea), and also some that are semi-privately working against the US (like China). These countries will take any advantage that they can- they will steal IP and use the US's development resources to catch up to the current state of the art at a reduced cost. So you don't have to put this in terms of good vs. bad, just think of it in terms of things that benefit the US and things that don't benefit the US. Whether you think people are evil is irrelevant, it is very logical for the US to put export controls on things that it doesn't want to give away for free. The US wants to preserve its advantage and make it as costly and difficult for these other countries to catch up.
They also aren't imprisoning people for speech, which is important when we're discussing who we want controlling AI in the future.
The entity that is least problematic (of the available options) and should be entrusted is the European Union.
Don't forget Central America and Iran; supporting military dictators in Southeast Asia (Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia); invading Haiti and raiding it of the entirety of its gold reserves, condemning its people to poverty -- one could go on and on.
When the controlling party of the US is discussing concentration camps for immigrants while also happily calling to revoke birthright citizenship and deport citizens of the US that criticize Trump or the Republican party (eh - who am I kidding - it's the maga/heritage party now)...
It feels like we have no legs left to stand on here, and the support was DAMN shaky to begin with, seeing as we were routinely knocking over governments that we see as inconvenient in our geopolitical sphere of control for the last 100+ years.
Essentially, I think your argument is about 3 elections stale.
They absolutely did directly and indirectly several times in their history. A few of those times were recently:
> In September 2020, it was revealed that ICE had performed mass hysterectomies on immigrant women in several detention centers, reminiscent of the long-standing US policy of sterilization of black and brown women. 2
> The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
> In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed "aliens", 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren't considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
> During the 2020 coravirus pandemic, it was found that a law that empowered police to arrest those for not social distancing, lead to 80% of those arrested being black and latino.
etc., etc., etc.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/us_atrocities...
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/us_atrocities...
So it makes sense to him to argue for export controls using whatever rhetorical flexes and flourishes he can come up with.
This situation is temporary, of course. China previously had a large incentive to get their own leading-edge nodes into production, and now they have a Manhattan Project-size incentive.
But TSMC is building new leading edge fabs right now.
Like, any global hegemony will be increasingly corrupt given the power that gives, IMO.
Can't remember which countries where bombed by China in last 50 years, but I can give you plenty of examples for the USA
I will freely grant that Euro money goes to completely obsolete heavy industries and luxury items rather than technology innovation (and blame all politicians for missing out on technology), but there are outliers like ASML that almost make up for the whole thing...
Choice is - USA or China. And I certainly know in which world I'd rather live.
2A provides access to weapons. It doesn't allow people to murder one another.
> but where access to food, shelter, healthcare and education are all expensive privileges subject to the whims of the free market,...
Article 1 Section 8 doesn't enumerate Congress the power to provide any of those things.
What's more, I beieve the Federal government shouldn't. Rights should only ever be negative unless being a counterparty to positive action taken by the government (e.g., it makes sense to provide public defenders since it is reactionary to the government trying to take away your rights).
Healthcare, education, etc. are better served by the private sector with charity as the supplement for the less fortunate.
> and where you don't even need the popular vote to elect a President (it's just nice to have) because the electoral system is a series of 18th century compromises to keep slavers happy...
The electorial system is designed to prevent tyranny of the majority and is biased towards inaction. This seems better than a pure democracy to me because most government action is bad: inefficient, introduces moral hazard, etc.
In a system of pure democracy, the bottom 51% can vote to tax the top 49%'s income away. Then the next iteration the new bottom 51% can vote the same. Eventually this could lead to purely even distributions. That seems wildly worse for society: all incentive to produce would be void.
But most of what the government does introduces dead weight to economic transactions or moral hazard. This is especially true when the government tries to provide social benefits beyond taking over a product or service that could perfectly well be provided by the private sector.
I would have little argument against the government regulating that private healthcare providers cannot discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions. It would increase costs uniformly across the industry. I do have arguments for providing healthcare on the basis of income, as I believe the program would be better served by private charity. Those who argue the contrary do so only because they want to force all citizens to contribute to the private charity (run publically) of healthcare-for-the-poor, because they want to solve someone else's problem but don't want to have to bear the burden themselves.