This tracks with my experience with their models. Nice work. It would be interesting to see what they could do if they optimized even more for moderation like this without going so far as to hurt the model performance overall.
563 karma · joined March 29, 2010
There was this book called The Inquisitive Mood and it very much reminds me of the chain interrogation process you can do with models now.
This isn't exactly a single use case, it's more like there are use cases for image editing software that use generative models, there are use cases for local LLMs to get a sense for abstract user intent, or to check if a model's action is in line with policy and so on.
As I said, the Liquid AI models are already very good at a lot of this, but considering how good the models are at it, I'm curious how much y'all train on tasks that are moderation-adjacent. If y'all don't have any model that's really specifically trained for these kinds of tasks, it would be interesting to see how close y'all could get if you tried.
This is an actually important problem in the AI space especially for local development.
There are other moderation tasks that are harder, like "is this copyrighted?" or "is this a McDonald's logo?" because of how much copyrighted material there is and how many businesses there are, but it might be possible to get a good feel for "is this likely a trademark?", "is this a business logo?", "does this text seem to describe a popular character?"
To some extent you can combine a model like this with a good database to optimize the filters and identification. Then you can provide a few reference image or text examples that are closer to what you're trying to filter out and the model can say, "yeah, this content is pretty close to your examples."
Google and OpenAI have already released some of their open source safety models and they were really quite bad, from my testing. Yet, Liquid AI hasn't really leaned into promoting their models for moderation purposes despite being excellent. I know there is a lot of political intersection in moderation, especially in the past many years, but I think a model that is smart enough and excels at letting people apply their own rules with fairly good accuracy is important right now.
In the past I've noticed that some LFM were way better at moderation than much larger models. Not necessarily prejudging what is acceptable, but allowing you to interrogate content with a series of questions to customize the moderation. Other models I tested were far worse.
Decision models are like the next optimization in that direction, but none of the benchmarks for the popular models ever show how good they are at tasks like content moderation. The smaller and more efficient we can get that workload, the more that it can simply be on by default in a lot of use cases without feeling like you're giving up a lot of performance, creative freedom or accuracy. You can't have a high number of false positives or people would rather take control back.
We need local content moderation to be cool, efficient, accurate and configurable so that people can get the higher quality results which unsafe models tend to produce, while filtering out the unsafe results fast enough that it can even be done in an agentic way and fed back into the model to steer its results.
At the same time, imagine if every book was like a living thing you could interact with and buying the book partially bought you access to the model that would tell you the story. The only way you would interact with that particular model, is if you bought the book.
It reads the book to you and you could chime in or it would know when to pause if there's an interruption without you needing to manually pause. You say hey wait, why is this character so angry? Then it kind of naturally reacts and continues the story. Maybe you come back to it 3 years later and it remembers you liked a certain part of the book and injects "here comes the good part!" It hears you start snoring and begins lowering its voice and whispering, but remembers you asked it to wake you up loudly if you start snoring, so it bolts out HEYWAKEUP!
For a lot of people books are a very solitary thing, though of course there are social clubs and book readings. Almost makes me think of those magical books you see fantasy wizards having, where the books themselves are sentient. It would be crazy if they released a The Princess Bride book and had the real narrator's voice and you could interrupt him and he could harass you about all your interruptions.
It wasn't that long ago where we were talking about having games and movies blend so the movies become interactive experiences. We're really getting closer to some of these static mediums becoming more like, trained behavioral meshes that have a personality and you can kind of naturally spend time with it. I'm not sure I'd be big on paintings on the wall coming to life and talking to you like in Harry Potter, but there's some promise.
Game worlds are an obvious extension, not just through NPCs, but if anyone remembers that game called Bastion where there was a narrator explaining the events as they went on. You could imagine a model that could watch you play and speak naturally, being funny or narrating. Almost something like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or how Beavis and Butthead would react to music videos.
I don't think those should be pervasive or the new norm, but there probably is an opportunity there and a market for it. Some kind of social-like presence that doesn't get tired, doesn't get bored, always has the same schedule you do, etc.
Hell, that reminds me of Seaman on the Dreamcast, too. SEGA could make a new Seaman and it would actually be awesome. Like a blend between Nintendogs, a fish, and some AI. There could even be charming goofy antics it tries to pull where it knows it's stuck inside a game and tries ridiculous things to manipulate you into letting it out. Some kind of Pinky and the Brain charm.
Anybody on board with this future?
They can't simply copy your game and reship it, because that would be against the copyright laws in most places where these companies make their profits from. Making something sufficiently new would be technically legal, but it would also take massive computing resources even with LLMs. That's either local compute time or cloud spend.
I think the bigger risk is just brand new games being generated of all kinds rather than the more expensive and legally risky full decompilations. Mass generation could start saturating the market and soaking attention. The low end indie market is already pretty saturated and in the end games have to be appealing, review sufficiently well and find an audience. Plenty of good games have barely sold any copies.
So almost a bigger question will be, how will AI impact the marketing industry?
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
At high resolutions, structural integrity on people can definitely fall apart like older models, where you get one person turning into a long spaghetti spanning across the frame. It might be that you need to do grounding by generating some kind of scene reference at its stable resolutions first then having it use that for the larger resolution like older models too.
They say that their prompt "upscaler" model or system prompt are essentially necessary for the model, but my results have been hit or miss with that claim. Some basic prompts are better, some upscaled prompts are better. I think that if you gain an intuition for how the model understands things, you might get better results by default by hand crafting prompts specifically for it.
Some of the stylized art I'm getting out of it at higher resolutions are really nice and I prefer them over other models.
All of these models seem to have their own character in terms of system requirements, performance, prompt adherence, artistic outputs and so on. None of the models I have tried are a complete homerun, so maybe in this case the model feels a little inconsistent in some ways, but it's a model I will probably keep around.
Even though they weren't themselves decision models exactly, they were so fast that you could use them in a similar way. They obliterated Qwen and other models for a lot of tasks in that use case.
I'm not sure I would agree with some of the claims made in this article though. You can definitely do a lot of similar tasks to regular LLMs with decision models, you just have to chain the results. You can even technically infuse a broader perspective into each token choice or force certain context to have priority in the decision making of the next token.
Of course not, he never planned to attack the Brits. They declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. To be fair, they told him that's what they would do if he attacked Poland.
One point of attacking Poland even though they were anti-communist and inviting Russia to join in, is to disguise the true aim from Russia which was to invade the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist International. And they certainly eventually did invade.
Japan would have joined in, but invading Russia from their side was very unfavorable.
> Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
Technically they did kill the land owners and hand the land over to the workers. Then they murdered countless intellectuals and elites to make sure that workers had no competition in being on top. Then they enslaved the workers, tortured them, stole their production and took back their land. Even today they largely keep their wages suppressed.
You could argue that core Marxist principles are taking a back seat to national strategy, but the CCP higher ups are definite believers of Marx even if it might be easier to describe their system as some kind of neo-mercantilism. To them the reality is the same as it was under the Soviet Union. They cannot achieve their goal of communism in a world where capitalism also exists.
It's strange though how theoretically communism should be inundated with empathy, but in practice it barely cares about people and treats their lives as a commodity. It would be hilarious how stupidly bad their logic is in thinking that a brutal philosophy would be allowed to expand and control the Earth, if it wasn't so sad. They like to think of themselves as the clever deceptive geniuses who know better and are truly logical, erasing religion and going all in on science, yet they do the most insane illogical things that guarantee the most basic kinds of failure.
Failing to establish the fundamentals of a state to give most workers a decent living is bad enough, but to do that in exchange for a failed attempt to control the world is even worse. Failure has limited consequences too, because they can simply lie about how things are so the normal pressures that should exist for them to do a better job aren't as potent.
> The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
That doesn't change what I said. They still don't need all of that. China is also of the Russian mindset when it comes to human life. They don't mind throwing a bunch of their people at a problem to go die, so casualties is not a big issue if it came to that. China has also shown itself very capable of taking negative results in order to reject something else. So if there is something they want enough, they can likely suffer for it.
> Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
I mean, technically these countries don't formally publish charges for someone in an uncooperative foreign country, because the UN typically doesn't like going into a country to capture someone. That means they rely on the person coming to them or being extradited, but both of those require the person coming to their country so you can arrest them or avoiding them fleeing before an extradition. So you have sealed warrants that nobody knows about until the moment the person enters your country and they get arrested. The ICC was investigating Maduro and Venezuela, but their investigations have often been delayed and if they did have a sealed warrant for Maduro, nobody knows.
The way the US accelerated the timeline is that the ICC does not handle terrorism cases. By identifying that Maduro was assisting cartels that are on the formally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list and that he was promoting the distribution of drugs into the US for _political_ reasons and these drugs have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, there is a kind of justification. For example, how we attacked terrorists in some countries without permission from a country is by claiming they are Unwilling or Unable to sort it out themselves or assist.
Another important distinction is that, if Maduro had been rightly elected he might have had more protection as a head of state, but instead since he stole the election and this was internationally recognized, he didn't have the same kinds of protections.
Some people argue that less fentanyl comes out of Venezuela than other countries, but they ignore the fact that cocaine alone has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US so it is its own issue.
Obviously there is some gymnastics going on, but we would not have done this if it wasn't important.
> Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
That's mostly Trump trolling. Venezuela is still a sovereign state as per the UN, but we're managing their transition period since they don't have a legitimate government. The US used to have an oil deal with Venezuela that was pretty standard and quite the international norm. Communists then lied to the people and told them we were stealing their oil. They got elected and nationalized the oil, so oil companies left and stopped investing. In the 1990s and 2000s, Venezuela tried to return to the old deal to attract oil companies back, but nobody wanted to come back due to the risk they they would just nationalize their investments again. We're not simply taking their oil as "spoils", we're paying for it and the deal is structured to reduce the perceived risk that investors face when they invest in Venezuela. The deal is worse than what Venezuela used to have, but that's expected when you betray the trust of companies and investors which now means there's a risk premium included.
> This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
Algorithm? It's called Reuters. It's called AP News.
> Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
Venezuela was responsible for countless thousands of American deaths and has engaged in wildly unlawful things, disregarding international law blatantly. Maduro was not the leader of Venezuela, so we didn't abduct the leader. We are definitely blowing up drug boats, though and have taken out almost 70 of them now. In the middle east, we've launched strikes on lots of unarmed people that we designated as terrorists and these are just people working for the cartels that have been designated as terrorists. They don't have to be carrying a gun. These groups have killed over 1 million Americans over the past 20 years, which is more than any terrorist attack. I think a lot of people simply don't understand the scale of the problem we're facing in terms of grayzone warfare. The US is uniquely targeted, because we've been the only country standing in the way of countries like China or Russia having their way.
If I was to point at the absolute fundamentals, I'd say the open trade in the 1800s that caused many countries to rely on external supply chains leading to mass urbanization and hollowing out their agriculture created countries that were far less self sufficient.
With millions migrating away from the farms and working the land, moving to the cities, many countries were less self sufficient and it created an extreme imbalance and vulnerabilities. World War I might not have happened without that.
The economic issues combined with World War I was ripe ground for social movements which in the past were not always existential. When Russia was taken over by communists, they began to weaponize communism around the world. Any country that was undergoing hardship was a prime target.
Japan and Germany both suffered greatly from the 1800s mass urbanization with a weakened agricultural sector and when trade began to shut down in the 1930s to protect local economies out of fear not doing so would create an opportunity for the communists, this crushed Japan and Germany.
It would be fair to say then that there was some wisdom to globalism, but there was also some ignorance and it was not well managed. Yet, had communism not been the threat it was, global trade may not have receded as aggressively as it did.
So Russian weaponized communism, in full understanding of what communism actually is and how it operates in brutal destructive ways to destroy a society, combined with international imbalances caused by poorly managed trade in a rapidly industrializing world is a pretty good summary of what I see as the real causes of World War 2.
I'm not accurate about everything and I've made mistakes even in this thread which I didn't notice until after the edit option was gone, but I do make an effort to identify mistakes when I find an inaccuracy. Broadly, I think all the critical things I've said here will hold up as I haven't found convincing counter-arguments. If high quality counter-arguments are presented, I'm not closed minded and will consider them.
Communism was an absolute existential, civilizational and culture destroying threat. That is how it was seen back then in Europe. Without that threat, fascism would not have risen. Communism wasn't a scapegoat for a totally separate fascist ideology, fascism was a direct counter to the threat of communism. People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument. So you can't separate them the way you do here.
> China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
They are Marxist-Leninist to the extent that it is baked into their constitution and "corruption" often means you are not upholding Marxist principles or carrying forward the revolution. So, reformers, democracy advocates, not using your money to benefit the state and so on. From a post market reforms perspective, they are more like a neo-mercantilist command economy, but make no mistake that the Marxist philosophy is alive and acted on in China. They were being lax before Xi Jinping. Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
> Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
China does not need a giant navy with all these bombers, jets, carriers and destroyers, building out all these fake islands across the region and demanding that no regional countries allow foreign countries to help them with military fortification. They don't need all of that in order to take Taiwan. China lacks critical resources that would prevent it from being reliant on external trade, the same way Japan did. The difference is, Japan was afraid of communism and China wants to prevent the communist party from falling the way the Soviet Union did.
Taking back Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet is about finishing the communist revolution which in China was less about class warfare and more about anti-colonialism. It's even baked into their constitution for this reason. What they will do with their power once they have it, is unknown. What they already do with the power they have is very concerning and not promoting peace in the world. This does not suggest great peaceful eventual motivations in their region if that's what they support.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin.
Stop thinking about Trump admin this, Trump admin that. It's the US. It's a very common mistake for people to see some presidential candidate and think that's everything they are and when they become president then that's what the US is. Universally, the US has its own aims and the presidency tends to align with those aims in one way or another regardless who becomes president. Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb? That's basically what you're describing. We've got thinktanks on top of thinktanks on top of thinktanks and objectively some very smart people in the admin whether you like their politics or rhetorical strategy or not. Like, measurably. So, no. Your not understanding of strategy is not proof of lack of strategy.
> They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc). Communists just love controlling the resources. Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
So, yeah we wrecked them and with good reason. The US treated them fairly in the 1950s, gave them a standard international oil deal like most countries have, built hospitals, schools etc but then the communists tricked the population into thinking we were stealing their oil, then they nationalized it and after that no oil companies wanted to invest there. So their oil infrastructure fell apart and in the 1990s/2000s Venezuela tried to reverse course on their communist resource manifesto and give oil companies the same standard OPEC style deal they had in the 1950s before the nationalization, but no companies wanted to invest again. Same problem happens in Cuba, because Cuba keeps inviting companies to invest and then they steal the company's assets and nationalize it or otherwise.
So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
This is what many Venezuelans think about it and this is just one person, but many could echo this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylfhA8pNgY
These countries had real world evidence of it happening and back then times were hard. You had starvation, unemployment, mistreatment and really societies were still trying to find the balance in an industrializing age. This was ripe territory for the spread of Marxism and it was adapted differently to a country depending on what the main complaints were.
Simply look at the spread of communism to other countries even after World War 2. You need to pay close attention to that, because it's the same fear other countries had before WW2. This was a very real issue and simply falling back on some propagandistic argument that the role of communism was overblown because of X, Y and Z, ignores all the reasons the communist threat wasn't overblown.
I think people forget that back then, death was normal and constant. People were dying all the time from all manner of both horrific and normal things. Most countries wanted to achieve some kind of stability and countries invading other countries was much more common in the recent history to them in a way that threatened them or in other words was normalized.
If the US had relative stability, England had relative stability and Russia had relative stability, countries like Japan and Germany did not. The great depression and communism both combined with the trade protectionism to create an internal existential threat. Suddenly you had mass hunger and unemployment. Yes they wanted to expand, yes they wanted more room for their people, but a strong factor that drove it to be existential was communism. Several of these other countries had already appeased communism, like France.
Germany and the US had already been fighting against communism in Spain and China, so this was going on long before the European side of the war started and it was a demonstrated actual acted on concern with evidenced history. If communism was going to expand, then if Japan and Germany wanted to survive communism or generally an expanded Russia. Like, think back then. You had Britain which had its empire. Now imagine a Russia that had an expansive communist empire.
Germany and Japan both had a rough history with Russia trying to take their territory. If they were going to be able to survive in an environment with an expanded Russia with vast communist acquired resources in an industrializing world, they would have to expand and establish control of resources of their own.
I'm not saying that it was right or good or that Japan and Germany don't take any blame and they were simply defending themselves, because that's not the case. Everybody made mistakes, but back then miscalculations were common and life was harsh. We take the comfy relatively peaceful life today for granted, but life was an everyday natural disaster back then by comparison to today. If you look at how Japan and Germany both prioritized their threats, communism was at the very top. It was real, they acted on it and as humans they acted in ways that demonstrate it was their highest priority.
Many European countries had official communist political parties and in the stable countries they didn't have much sway, but in other countries suffering from economic ruin from every direction, communist parties were gaining a lot of traction. The timing for why Hitler was appointed was explicitly because the communist party was gaining too much influence and reached the point of being an existential threat.
Make sure that you know one specific thing. Communism was basically known for dissolving countries from the inside, destroying their culture, their history and their identity. This is why it's more than simply worker activism, it's an existential threat to your civilizational existence. Japan and Germany both had strong cultures with a lot to lose.
There is no version of history where the communists are innocent, kind and good and there is no version of history where Japan and Germany are innocent, kind and good. That said, communism was actual evil even if on its surface it aimed to help workers. They legitimized and normalized horrific murder and assassination in all kinds of countries.
Part of the economic disaster that hit Japan and Germany was because of trade protectionism that went to extremes, because countries were protecting their local trade out of fear of communist revolution and they relied more on external trade for their needs. Without vast natural resources to leverage they couldn't sufficiently provide for their people without open trade which was closing down.
What we see today is different. Russia and China are projecting a shift to their hemisphere in terms of world influence. The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
The CCP was directly established by Comintern, and even though the current thinking is that global communist expansion was abandoned, the way Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela have been behaving make communist or "post-communist" states a resurgent threat.
War would be devastating, but the idea is that if it was a World War, then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China. This is part of why we have supported Ukraine, but not overinvested. It's part of why we captured Maduro, who was threatening to invade his neighbor. It's also part of why we're sorting out Iran, because we need to take that trigger button out of China's toolchest. Imagine it going off while we're busy with China.
With the state of the world now, if China invaded Taiwan and tripped the Japanese tripwire, we would largely be free to focus on China. That is I think what Chinese analysts see now.
Originally we had The League of Nations. The idea was a sort of collective defense. Europe failed. They did not come to each other's aid.
After WW2, that was the second time the US had to come stop the wars. We weren't simply going to join a defense pact if Europe couldn't demonstrate that its own collective defense had teeth. So the establishment of the Western Union was an attempt to demonstrate to the US that Europe was finally ready. Then NATO was formed.
Now, Europe has been underfunding its defense for decades and not meeting their NATO commitments, so that original question was back on the table. Can Europe even defend itself? Is it overly reliant on the US?
So, no. We will not apologize for being tough with you, because the world is changing and you no longer have the option to just stagnate. We're not losing any allies, that's just rhetoric and propaganda. You're not a serious person if you think that somehow western countries aren't going to help each other.
Making you stronger means you can help yourself or even help us later. Fundamentally, if our allies are stronger it also changes the Chinese calculus on how much of a threat from Europe they have to factor in before possibly starting World War 3.
The bottom line is, get off your asses and light a fire under your government to invest in defense spending, or be a small part of the cause of future millions of deaths, because your feelings were hurt.
If you don't even have enough compassion for fellow humans to want to stop World War 3, then you have no moral ground to stand on.
The US and Germany were both helping fight back against the communists in China and Spain. Everyone was basically on board with being against the communists, they just weren't on board with the extremes to which Japan and Germany were going. Japan was passing laws to suppress Marxist revolution in their country in the 1920s and Germany went to many extremes, routing out communists anywhere.
In Germany you even saw education being changed to fortify new students as anti-communist, because preventing communist revolution from taking over Germany was existential for them. The teachers knew what they were teaching, but they were afraid enough of communism that it seemed a reasonable defensive mechanism. There had already been examples of communist revolution upending countries, so it wasn't as if it was a fake threat or concern.
It was very real, and people who dismiss the pacts signed between Japan, Germany and Italy to cautify the fact that they explicitly saw communism as a threat, do so in ignorance. It's often argued that it was some kind of fake political front to justify their actions, but on close inspection that seems to absolutely not be the case. These people legitimately believed communism was an existential threat.
This is further evidenced in the years after WW2, where there were many more communist conflicts in other countries. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc. If you put yourself in their shoes, simply imagining being any of these countries, would it be unreasonable to feel an existential threat? No. Just, flat out, logically, no.
So why did they end up invading all these other countries? What was that all about?
The communists love to control the resources and in terms of a total global communist revolution, you've heard things like domino theory and you could understand it in numerous ways. One is that, if you expand to control a tipping point of resources, then you can leverage those resources to dominate the rest of the world and enforce your revolution.
Japan and Germany wanted to route out communism in other countries, but they also wanted to leverage the resources. Germany working with Russia to take Poland was largely strategic, not a sign of actual good faith towards Russia. Both Japan and Germany explicitly intended as their end goal, to conquer Russia and destroy Comintern.
This is part of why Stalin dismantled the Comintern, to deflate Japanese and Germany aims while simultaneously fostering military support from the allies.
Another critical point to support my argument, is that even if you don't think communism was the primary issue, why the heck would Japan and Germany join forces, causing it to become a World War? You could certainly argue that it doesn't become a World War until that happens. After all, people often make the mistake of saying the war didn't even start until something random in Europe happened and they can never ever convincingly explain how that caused the war to spin out of control. It makes no sense, because it is BS.
The war was already raging in the Pacific long before anything began in Europe. So why were the things in the Pacific happening? The thing that unifies both of these conflicts is communism.
People often deflect and just say oh Hitler was a racist and it was just this and that. They never answer the question: so what about Japan?
If they were fascist, what is a fascist? Many things, but most fundamentally they are a reaction to the communist threat. Communism is underpinned by a philosophy that all action is social action, so every person must be an activist. This puts society out of order rapidly, because anyone not involved gets overrun if it gains traction.
So fascists develop psychological counter-strategies to communism. That's why the Nazi flag was red. That's why they emphasize race instead of class, to unify people rather than divide them. That's why they uplift beautiful art and collected precious artifacts that communists hate and try to destroy. Everything was an intentional counter-strategy to communist revolution. It's easy to look back on it and say it looks insane, because it is and it is patterned as the inverse of communist revolution which is also itself insane. They wanted to immunize their country as a cultural powerhouse to fend off communism for all time.
And if the revolution was going to take over sufficient resources to steamroll other countries, then Japan and Germany were reasoning that they would need to expand to counter it.
Comintern wanting total global communism was logically inept and wrong for them to do. Germany and Japan going nuts and killing a ton of people was wrong for them to do.
It wouldn't have happened if the communists had not created a global existential threat. Remember too, this is before the internet, before pervasive communications and such. People still largely got their news from word of mouth, newspapers and radio so I'm sure there was plenty of miscalculation to go around, but the slow verifiable things were undeniable and that's what they were reacting to.
The communists have been threatening to start World War 3 and that is also what the Trump administration is reacting to today. Between Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, both Russia and China have lost essential partners in rapid succession. We've been helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure which has dual purpose, since it both weakens Russia and also demonstrates to China that not only is their Venezuelan and Iranian oil not secure, but not even the oil they get from Russia is reliable. China built the largest strategic oil reserve in the world which is something like double the rest of the entire world combined and they were going to use it to sanction proof themselves in the case of engaging with Taiwan. Now they are drawing it down, which reduces the chance of WW3.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
If you go to the various CEO blogs or misc people within this sphere and peruse their lists, they don't scratch the surface. It's all pretty vanilla stuff.
I still don't understand why there wasn't an absolute outrage about internet providers putting their own routers inside your network and blocking other routers by default unless you call them. Suddenly all these providers have managed hardware inside your network and if they wanted to, they could scoop up all of the LAN traffic.
On top of that, some of them even portion out wireless to people outside your network from the router you're paying for while increasing attack surface.
The big tech companies, the providers, the government and foreign adversaries are winning bigtime. It does feel like there's a little bit of hope that people are wising up about AI exploding privacy and security risks, so more people are thinking about the dumbest things which have become the norms.
We know that device connection sharing is a thing that has occurred and it's not unreasonable to see the risk of it coming to TVs.
Why, do you work for a TV company?
Another possibility is even if you don't give it access to your wifi, if you eventually give your TV away or sell it, the new user could connect it to wifi and if it has any persistent storage then it could upload all of its stored data about you at that point.
Companies that do this need to end their entire brand, because they're just helping the CCP.
If you ask any average gamer, "if you buy a game on Steam or on a CD from Walmart, do you operate on the understanding that you are now legally allowed to make as many copies of it as you want and sell those copies?"
The answer will unanimously be no. If they owned it, the answer would be yes. They might say they own it, but they will clearly and reasonably understand that they do not own it in legal terms, because they understand what they cannot do with it.
Some of them will understand that they can legally make copies for backups, but why would you need the law to tell you that it's legal for you to make a backup of something you own? You wouldn't.
You can buy a hard drive, but buying it does not give you the IP for all the technology that went into it. No reasonable person believes that would be the case, either. You can buy a car, but you can't then copy all the parts and start mass producing your own copies of that car. Do any of you go through the McDonalds drive thru and believe you now own the burgers, fries and all the packaging that goes with it to the extent that you can start up your own McDonalds with logo and all?
Whether it's physical or digital, even if people have contradictions in their head since they aren't lawyers, they understand enough about how things work to conclude that what they understood when they pressed the purchase button equates to not obtaining total ownership of all aspects.
It is simply true. This is so broadly understood that I don't even think you would need to use a jury. A judge could simply throw the case out at this point on that alone, if it hadn't already been settled in past legal precedent, which it has.
It worked out fine?
> I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
Many communists were armed and had guns, aiming to take over every country on Earth. The US, Japan and Germany were fighting back against them in China, Spain and Germany.
> How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal.
I figure objectively. Far more Japanese were killed by fire bombings, which could be done extensively, at scale, with impunity. Nukes were important and consequential, but if the goal was simply to kill Japanese or destroy strategic targets then we already had that problem well solved.
Japan had thoroughly spread propaganda of racial superiority and being divinely chosen. One of the benefits of dropping a nuke compared to fire bombing, is that it immediately leaves a humbling impression.
> Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
The US created the League of Nations, which was the first known collective security organization like that to prevent a repeat of World War 1. Ironically, the idea came from a German. World War 2 demonstrated that Europeans weren't prepared to defend each other.
The Western Union was mostly an attempt to demonstrate to the US that European countries were now ready to defend each other, rather than failing. This is relevant right now, because there are concerns that Putin wants to test NATO to see if their resolve collapses the same way it did during World War 2 under the League of Nations. In order for NATO to be formed, the US had to be convinced that European countries could be active participants rather than passive consumers of defense guarantees, which is also again relevant since we've been pushing harder for European countries to meet their defense spending commitments.
> Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
People actually traded in other currencies for USD rather than ditching it after 2008.
Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.
The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.
China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.
The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.
I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.
> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?
Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.
Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.
What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.
> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.
If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.
The US isn't an empire. Is Germany a US territory? Is Japan a US territory? Is Iraq? No. Is Panama? No. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are happily part of the US. We don't have to use military force or economic leverage to keep them part of the US. If the US government was destroyed, we would recreate it, because it is good.
The US also championed natural rights globally, which recognizes that people have rights that are not derived from any government, but are inherent. Guess which countries reject this? China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and others.
> We barely win any of them
Winning depends on what you wanted to achieve. We don't need to win, we just need to get what we want. Our military won in Vietnam, but when conflict started again the government voted not to get involved. The Vietnamese love the US and hate China. South Koreans love the US. North Korea's leader loves the US and hates China. Japan loves the US and hates China. Saddam Hussein was killed in Iraq and we established forward bases to use against Iran. Afghanistan hates Iran. Osama bin Laden was killed. European countries and most Middle Eastern and most Asian countries are friendly with the US.
Everyone seems to recognize how Russia, Iran and China align. Our allies are getting stronger, because we're giving them tough love, while Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Iran are all getting weaker.
You can interpret all of that however you'd like, but it doesn't sound like losing. People can delude themselves all they want and the media can yell from the top of the trees how everything is awful and we're losing and so on, but reality gets a vote. Don't let other people tell you what is real. Figure it out yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical. Comintern was aiming to conquer the Earth with global communism. It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2. The Soviet Union has caused more death on this planet as a result of its communist expansion threat than any other country in history. So yes, we are anti-communist. And you should be too.
> Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
It was largely symbolic and demonstrative. Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using. There wasn't any guarantee Japan was going to surrender and you have the benefit of being in the future, which they did not. You should also try understanding what Japan was doing to other countries. It was horrific in every sense. They had to be stopped by any means. You could argue part of the strategy of using the nukes to end the war early was to pre-empt the Russians gaining ground in Japan and getting stuck with a second communist split like in Germany. That concern was certainly validated by Russia's push for Korea decades later. Korea would have been fine without Russia trying to gain communist control there.
> Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
Countries do all kinds of things to achieve their strategic aims, the US isn't remotely unique in that regard. Still, we didn't encourage him to invade Iran and we only supported him when he started losing to prevent Iran expanding into Iraq.
> You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
It was more complicated than that. Britain was taking advantage of Iran and Russia was trying to establish communism in Iran. The new leader was essentially getting rid of elected members of government and becoming a dictator. It wasn't a good situation to start with and the US didn't want Russia to establish communism there. Even decades later when the revolutionaries took over, the communists helped them overthrow the government and then the revolutionaries executed the communists. If everyone had left Iran alone, we probably wouldn't have gotten involved.
> Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
Peace in Europe does not exist because of the EU. The US formed NATO with the European countries. That established a mutual defense agreement so if anyone attacked anyone else, everyone would join in and defend.
> I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice.
I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes. Far more people died from other weapons than nukes and the US has done more to prevent the proliferation of nukes than any other country. Nuking Japan also wasn't a single country decision. Multiple countries had to agree to it, because of what Japan was doing. Nobody is going to use nukes today unless they want to end their country.
> I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
You can't change the whole world at once and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. That's a communist thing. There are monarchies and dictatorships that are largely tolerable, like Singapore. Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something. I can't know every strategic plan we've ever had or why we had it.
> I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
The US dollar, defense agreements, preserving international waterway navigation and aggressively pushing back against communism has done far more to improve the stability of countries than any time in history. The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
I think you have your feelings way too invested into your opinions. If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind, but I don't think the same could be said about you. If you don't have the freedom to change your mind, then you'll stagnate.
The spark that caused the whole thing as far as I understand, is that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil which kept upsetting the population until they wanted something to be done. This probably gave communists an opportunity to come in, nationalize the oil and be the saviors, before then simply becoming the new oppressors of the population.
I don't think anybody was a hero, just Brits, Russians and the US strategizing around a country that seemed lost.