Except I haven't devolved from anything. It's entirely consistent, and the whole chain confirms that it isn't possible to coherently debate this with people whose starting position is insane, like yours. At it is insane to assert that "trivially every other country has a better rack record" than the US does, and it is insane to claim that the US was founded with the express intention of killing off the indigenous inhabitants of North America. These are insane positions to hold, and yet ... here you are.
Amazing. I do not owe a foreigner a debate or explanation on how their contrived and ridiculous claim about the origin of my country is wrong. You start off by violating the very same rule that you now claim that I am violating, and then get upset that I respond in kind. 10/10, no notes.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
This is your original comment. "Predicated" means "to establish". So, your claim is the United States was founded "to ethnically cleanse the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide". Can you find some primary sources, from George Washington perhaps, where he says "we are founding this country to kill the natives". Please be specific. Is English not your first language?
Again, this is such a common thing. You are the one that introduced this absurd claim, not me. I have not derailed anything, and there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.
No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.
Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.
All true but the kind of alignment problem you're talking about is only possible when the core of a society is directed at inspiring, bold, massive projects. There's not much on offer as an alternative to Muskism. It's worth remembering how insane everyone thought he was for claiming you could land the rocket upright and reuse it. And even more so, that you could catch one with chopsticks.
Yes I already said I understand that you hate the United States. Is your actual point that you want to play some sort of "which country has the highest body count in their history" competition? I'm not distracting (or distracted) from anything, I am fully aware of the kinds of games you and those like you attempt to play.
The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.
Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.
Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".
>Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.
The problem here is that you appear to believe there is a factual claim involved, when there isn't. It's like claiming the point of water is to drown people.
Edit, since I noticed you're the author upthread. It's worth pointing out, since you are new here, that your initial comment also violates the spirit of the guidelines.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
Forgetting for a moment if this is true or not, it's not a claim that's falsifiable. It's an ideological statement that is meant to convey that the speaker a) is likely a communist (congratulations), b) has extreme disdain for the United States, and c) attempts to redirect what are meant to be policy discussions into a blackhole of attempting to argue about whether or not the United States is evil. This is pointless, but is a common tactic used by online bullies.
>further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine
Genuinely laughed out loud at this. This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so. It's comically at odds with the written record.
>But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2
Oh wow, news to me. Last I checked, we had pretty much the entire planet trying to come here. Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization? Or do you want me to do this.
Setting aside for a moment whether or not whatever they are doing is or is not a genocide (I don't pay attention to that matter, it doesn't concern me and the outcome of that conflict has nothing to do with my country or people), is your statement meant to mean that the United States is a puppeteer of Israel or something?
I genuinely applaud the sentiment, but it's no longer possible. Maybe back in the 1990s this would've been an excellent trade block but all countries are no longer similar or internally homogeneous enough to make such a prospect functional. Much of the type of trade anyway would've been defense in nature, and that's sort of emerged as a big problem across all potential members.
Most countries in Europe have more restrictive abortion policies than a state chosen at random in the US. Your perception is unbelievably flawed. Almost this entire thread has a cartoon/marvel comic version of "US BAD, everyone else good" in their heads.
>[China] has a better track record than the US; trivially, as every other country does.
This is a fair take? Really. That "every other country" has a better "human rights" track record than the US, so countries including Russia. Or the oft-accused-of-genocide Israel.
I don't think it's possible to coherently debate these policy moves when the starting point for the opposition is "I am choosing to be insane about my view of history and the position of the respective countries party to the dispute".
I still run Windows 10 on my PC, and one night I spend about 3 hours with ChatGPT turning off all of the bullshit telemetry and other nonsense that Windows runs in the background. Total was about 2.5 GB of RAM, roughly.
Why is Windows like this? One would think the at the company whose value proposition is, allegedly, "optimize your productivity" would not do things like this with their operating system. When this PC dies, and I figure I've got a long while left given my penchant for refusing to spend money on computer hardware, I will not be booting a Windows system again. What a mess.
They may be honest when they express themselves initially, but their revealed preference later ends up being very tragic. I know several women, and others who are friends of my wife, that did the "I don't want kids" routine only to realize that this was a huge mistake and enter the dating market at 37 to find nothing but a wasteland. People can pretend that their own reason can override their biological reality, but only to a point. "I don't want to have kids" means you die alone. Eventually people realize this.
Well, evaluating the nature of this thought experiment reveals what you actually believe about human evolution and development. I find it extremely hard to believe that someone from 40k years ago would be indistinguishable from humans today. Believing this requires you to imagine that there are no genetic selection pressures for things like intelligence, behavior, physical ability ... 40k years ago had Earth as an almost entirely different planet. Europe was frozen for most of the year, for example. There were no trees. Very, very hard to believe that people born back then could grow up to sit in front of a laptop today.
That's such an extreme claim. It defies common sense. You'd have to proclaim that there was some event that _stopped_ evolution in humans, universally. How is that even possible? Especially 50k years ago. I'd be a little more forgiving if the claim was that evolution stopped in, say, 1999.
Perhaps it was not a widespread belief among scientists, I don't know, but if you were to posit in front of polite company that humans are today and always have been under evolutionary pressures that select for certain traits you would have gotten some odd looks. The implications are possibly a little uncomfortable, especially if what this article suggests is true and the pace of evolution is accelerating.
Your point appears to be that my deeply held belief is more reasonably attainable than as an activity someone can engage in that what should result from "I believe the world is going to end unless all global economies cease activity in order to drop carbon emissions to zero". In which case, yes I agree and the conversation is over.
>Australian here. What makes you think the "forest fire prevention" methods you outlined upthread are "basic"?
American here. They are basic where I come from (the midwest). We learned about them as children. Australians used to have a similar sense of adventure and appetite for what would otherwise be considered difficult projects.
The initial claim here was that these fires are the result of political leadership in my country deciding to not nuke the economy to make a number on a chart go down, or at least stabilize. I'm not going to argue the finer points of how much carbon release actually matters, because I think the right way to think about it is "increasing carbon release in atmosphere is not a good idea". I am in fact not arguing against something that people don't really say, because, again, this whole argument was started by people claiming that my country is responsible for Canada's inability to do basic forest fire prevention.
>and in the process you're making arguments in support of climate change denial
I am in fact not. Climate change "denial", such as this is even a real conviction that exists, is simply a phrase used as a hammer to get people to agree with a particular political program. Do you support declaring war on China and India and grinding their economies to a screeching halt? Because that would actually be the most effective way to drop carbon emissions back down to pre-1990s levels. The only countries that care about this stuff are the ones where their carbon emissions are a rounding error. The ones that don't care about this are the actual problems.