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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

Strange times. I truly feel these are the last days of our Republic. Especially if more aren't willing to take a stand.

As a Canadian looking in, I see people talking about a 36% approval as low.

How is it that high!?

That means that more than 1-in-3 of your countrymen are ride-or-die, and it's just heartbreaking to see that we're going to have to launch that many people into the sun.

Your comment is actually a great example of why his approval rating is as high as it is. It's because those who still support him know what you think of them. They know that you think of them as less than human, and they are willing to do anything, even support a complete monster like Trump (and he is a murdering, sociopathic monster), to fight against you. And one promise he is keeping, along all the many he's broken, is that he is fighting the left.

Don't think that people like you, who so casually dehumanize those who disagree, have no responsibility in him getting elected.

I'll take your point in good faith, but the fact remains that you have about 100M people in a fascist cult that need to be deprogrammed.

I don't claim to know how to fix this, but I also have no bandwidth for false equivalency with people who routinely deny things we can see with our eyes.

I know they're saying it's that high, but I doubt those numbers. Further, that number is going down every day. People are massively against this, and I would estimate that millions of his former supporters have left as they see what he really is. Of the ones who are still there, a few of them are lunatics who think that it is okay for America to invade, conduct regime change, and kill at will, but the great majority of them are people who won't admit to themselves the truth because they will be cast out of their tribe. Tribalism like that is a very powerful force in people, on both sides (and this whole concept of left and right sides is really something that needs to go away: it is really us vs the elites). Some of these people can be reached, and when they come to their senses, shouldn't be rejected. Large numbers already have, and I do believe it's in the millions.

To counter point, do you think AI companies located on our adversaries turf will take the same stand? I agree its nightmarish to think of AI surveillance. But why is that being lumped in with weaponry? I see these as two separate issues.

> "I see these as two separate issues."

... in the same sense as the two sides of a coin are separate sides maybe.

Do we need a "human in the loop" when targeting autonomous machines?

Anthropic isn't even taking a particular hard stance. Their mass surveillance prohibition only applies to domestic spying, so they're a-OK with spying adversaries. If all of the AI companies all over the world took the same stance, it wouldn't improve the life of Americans one bit.

The only other thing that the foreign AI companies could do is say no to automated killing bots, which doesn't even seem like that good of an idea considering that your countrymen will most likely have to interact with these robots that can kill without any oversight.

> To counter point, do you think AI companies located on our adversaries turf will take the same stand?

I guess if we are going this way, we might already start building camps for the undesirables, since our adversaries will surely do that too.

I'd say you're right, except that Trump is near death (maybe) and (more importantly) very unpopular.

He's more polarizing than usual maybe with stronger approve/unapprove ratings but his net popularity is in line with most 2nd term presidents at this stage.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-...

Yes, not historically unpopular, but enough that "I'm running for a third term" will be hard to pull-off.

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