The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.
It's not, really, if you are now ignoring all of the dictatorial theocracies that we support enthusiastically, and focusing on the ones that America is looking for an excuse to intervene in.
And this is not a "why focus on this thing when there are other things" fake argument. These protests were engineered by people with the intention of intervening, and a lot of that engineering the involved manipulation of western media narratives and the creation of fake organizations to become sources of information. It's not coincidence or luck that you're focused on Iran; people were sitting around planning an invasion of Iran and part of their planning was "How can we get the public to focus on Iran enough to give Congress cover to ignore another Executive war?"
The actual narrative, undisputed by even the people involved, is that
1) a currency crash was intentionally instigated in Iran by the West, which caused protests. We have bragged about this.
2) Many of the educated Iranian middle class joined these protests to argue against the regime in general, which they always do.
3) US and Israeli-supported terrorist organizations took advantage of those protests (like a black bloc) to start burning down buildings and burning cops alive, armed by the west and networked through smuggled Skylink terminals,
4) the US and Israel bragged that the protests were materially supported by covert western intelligence in order to push the crackdown to atrocity levels, and to eliminate even the general public's support for the protests (which would be some restraint to the government.) They literally said that many of the protesters were Mossad agents. You might as well be saying "please kill them." It's as if Al Qaeda announced that they were materially supporting and completely infiltrating BLM protests, and when many BLM activists were arrested, they were carrying Al Qaeda satellite terminals and arms smuggled from Pakistan.
(The Iranian middle class was even out, because they aren't traitors, they just don't want to live in a theocracy. The West are who turned Iran into a dictatorship by replacing Mossadegh with the Shah. The West helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. We care nothing about Iranians, we just want to steal from them. We're thieves, and we're consciously moving to a economic strategy of piracy in order to take advantage of our navy.)
5) The US moved as much navy to bear on Iran as it did when it invaded Iraq, and said that unless some magic words were said that nobody knows, it would invade.
You might be comfortable being manipulated like this, but I am not.
The case for intervention in Iran is much stronger, from the perspective of the United States, if you zoom out and realize that a larger fight in the Pacific is brewing and it would be wise to remove a player from the board who would happily provide access to fuel and refining capacity to PRC. Not saying I agree with this, necessarily, but it helps to steel man the more sophisticated cases when you are trying to understand complex geopolitical events.
To the extent that the protests are being "engineered", certainly there are elements of that, but why wouldn't there be and why would that be bad a priori? The regime is uniquely terrible in the world, and if you listen to Iranian ex-pats who fled it seems clear a lot of the kids that supported the revolution in 1979 quickly realized that it was a mistake, and that they underestimated the extent to which the new regime would prioritize regressive islamism over actually addressing what were at the time legitimate economic inequality issues.
>it would be wise to remove a player from the board who would happily provide access to fuel and refining capacity to PRC.
Washington has an easier way to do that: namely, to use its navy and the Sentinel Islands (controlled by Washington ally India) to prevent the transit of tankers from Iran to China.
Yes, possibly, but running an indefinite blockade or interdiction operation is still costly. It is lower in complexity in terms of operational capabilities required than a decapitation strike against the potential co-belligerent, although this is rapidly changing, but in order to effectively run one you are dedicating a very sizable percentage of your overall combat power away from the front. Additionally, I am skeptical that the Indian Navy could handle such an operation independently. Their fleet size has grown over the last decade, but, as alluded to, interdiction operations are increasingly complex so they would likely need assistance at least at the beginning. It's also, I think, a stretch to call India an "ally" per se of Washington today (maybe "partner" would be more accurate), and I find it hard to believe that India would effectively enter into a world war on behalf of the United States.
There is an argument to be made that a maritime interdiction operation is a better approach, and the information I would need to decide definitively which approach I think is better is likely very classified.
If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.
Not wrong, but don't forget there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here, though admittedly some parties have more affiliated with them than others. It's not a stretch to assume should fighting in the streets escalate beyond ICE shenanigans that larger armies would not quickly congeal from the pocket groups and individuals.
> there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here
That’s still not a civil war in the conventional sense. If it gets entrenched and coördinated it could be come something we’ll debate, e.g. the Troubles. But insurgency != civil war.
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Civil wars are large-scale mobilizations. That’s what makes them uniquely destructive. Insurgencies are also destructive, but in a categorically-different way.
I am, under the right circumstance. I'm not a pacificist, at least not historically. Although, we can banter all day with tough words, but the reality is that none of us can really predict how we will react to a situation until we are in it.
Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower.
I am speculating wildly but I would expect the exact opposite due to different actors trying to destabilize the US to the point of no recovery in such an event.
I love comments like this. You pop out of your (presumably New Zealand) prepper bomb shelter to get enough WiFi signal to make a post. I will bet against people like you all day long and make lots of money. How much are you willing to bet that there will be civil war in the US in 2026? Let's meet on PolyMarket!
There were large protests in the wake of a law enforcement officer killing someone in 2020 too. Notably, there was not a civil war, even though the Trump administration used the protests as cover for bad behavior then too
2020 was a single accidental case as the result of a poor system. Many people even from within the system on all levels agreed something went wrong and apologized. Today's situation is different, as the whole system is weaponized on purpose from one specific layer/group against the other layers/groups of the system. It's an internal conflict within the system itself, and a prime-example for justifying a civil war. And at the time Trump was still on the leash of his own adminstration.
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