As someone old enough to have seen the US invade too many countries, I'm struck by the lack of effort put into justifying this sort of military action these days. There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal and I have no idea where the courts or history will ultimately land on that decision. But the way they don't even try to convince us this is necessary anymore is a sign that wherever the line is, we let it slip too far.
To briefly quantify some things: US public support at the onset of the Afghanistan invasion polled at 88% [a]; at the onset of the Iraq invasion, 62%, rising to 72% [b]; and Venezuela here and now polls at 30% supporting "U.S. taking military action in Venezuela" [c] (Nov. 19–21 2025).
I suspect that invading and bombing a country for a few hours and then pulling out is not what most people will have in mind when you mention "taking military action". People are much, much more likely to remember the military quagmires in Vietnam or the Middle East, which have absolutely nothing to do with what occurred here.
Taking out Maduro is likely to lead to similar consequences as toppling Saddam, isn’t it? I predict the nation will be very unstable for decades ahead.
The action is smaller scale, but the ethics of it are the same: it’s abhorrent. The justifications are paper-thin ”the people deserve democracy”, while everyone knows the only interest served is that of the US government.
"Taking out Maduro is likely to lead to similar consequences as toppling Saddam, isn’t it? "
I don't think so. The Near East is a simmering cauldron of ancient ethnic and sectarian hatreds. Compared to that, Venezuela is ethnically and religiously almost homogeneous.
There is no equivalent of mad clerics preaching to their flock that they have to exterminate their heretic neighbours and that God will grant them paradise for doing so.
That’s the same talking point the far right uses for why the US shouldn’t get involved in Ukraine because they worry about a destabilized Russia if Putin goes away.
It’s some sort of dictator insurance policy. The idea that they are there because the country will likely just do it again but worse given the chance.
I’d say it’s easily the most common talking point I’ve seen from westerners on Twitter against overly supporting Ukraine and specifically providing them advanced American weaponry to strike within Russia proper, which was the biggest debate/controversy for about two years.
Also not necessarily “remove Putin by force”, it’s create instability in Russia where there’s a power vacuum if they lose badly in Ukraine.
Everyone just takes all of their American foreign policy lessons from Iraq and applies it broadly because Iraq briefly had ISIS and other extremist pop up
It’s also deeply rooted in a lack of respect for the general public in those countries, who they think will keep supporting evil regardless
”Following the war on social media” is a highway to poor psychological health, so I’ve avoided that after the first few weeks of the Russian invasion. In retrospect, I think I’m better off for having missed these far-right talking points.
Edit: Twitter? Why would anyone but the far right still be on Twitter these days?
Not necessarily, but there is the risk that ELN will further consolidate power. Maybe the US dies not want the group's leader, Antonio Garcia, to be the next president of Venezuela.
Public opinion in 2001 and 2003 followed the 9/11 terror attack and was very fresh in peoples mind. A more recent war (2015) would be the attack on Yemen by Barack Obama.
I can however not find any good public opinion for that war.
I don't think Americans perceive much of a difference between attacking Al Qaeda++ in Afghanistan versus in Yemen, certainly not enough to see it as "a different war", and it's not clear that perception is incorrect.
Afghanistan had the context of 9/11. All Americans knew about 9/11, and most cared strongly about it.
I doubt most Americans know anything about Yemen or know anything about any US involvement there, nor do they care.
Military strikes in Yemen aren't seen as the same war. Afghanistan and Iraq were boots on the ground, building up military bases, hearing about the occasional death of US personnel, etc. It's also decades apart.
When it comes to Yemen, the average American is probably entirely unaware of it, and the ones that do know about it are definitely going to place it in the Palestine/Israel context (which has huge mindshare circulation here, All things considered - we usually just ignore things outside of US borders and this is ultra politicized here). Maybe without that element, there would be more truth to what you were saying, but it's definitely in the Israel/Hamas war bucket as of now.
I think Americans are broadly aware that the US has been striking AQ, AQ++, and ISIS affiliates across the Middle East as part of the broader GWOT/OIR for years, and the exact jurisdictions in which it happens are essentially implementation details.
As of a few months ago, when the US began striking Yemen for purpose of defending Israel, it ha become loosely affiliated with that conflict, but the period discussed was Obama era.
We've been bombing Yemen on and off since post 9/11, including a rather large attack with UK support just last year (2025). Are you thinking of the Saudi-led intervention that occurred in 2015 in Yemen as part of the Yemeni civil war? Or maybe when we built a base there in 2011 to facilitate more drones?
I think this is a very good indicator US has been transitioning away from democracy towards something else for quite a while and now it has reached a point where no justification for an illegal war is even required.
After the Iraq war we(US allies that were dragged into this war by a bunch of lies) felt like this was very bad, but it was a blunder of one administration and the trust in the US as a whole was going to be restored.
> After the Iraq war we(US allies that were dragged into this war by a bunch of lies) felt like this was very bad, but it was a blunder of one administration and the trust in the US as a whole was going to be restored.
I don't understand how people can be this naive. It's the only thing the US has ever done for the entirety of it's existence! How did you miss that?
True. Maduro has not been the president since the last elections; he merely usurped the position. You cannot perform such an action without facing some constraints. For him, personally, maybe this was the better outcome.
First, read up on Venezuela's oil. I don't think that's the case. At the very least it's very expensive oil, hard to use and very bad for engines, refineries and for the environment and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)
Second, when the US did have Venezuela's oil things were going a lot better in Venezuela for the whole population. So would that really be such a bad thing?
Third, Chavez made things so bad in Venezuela it's tough to imagine this making it worse. Oh and then he died and Maduro came ... and made things worse.
> and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)
Back in the 90s, my dad told me a quote from someone big in oil:
"Oil is too valuable to burn"
(Shah of Iran? Trouble with searching for quotes on the internet, they get misattributed a lot).
Oil as a fuel will, hopefully, be over soon. 2028 is… I think that's too soon, though it would be good if it was. But oil is useful for a lot more than just fuel, and engineered bacteria synthesising more is probably more like a 2030s thing than a 2028 thing.
You don't understand. 2028 is the time peak oil will definitely be behind us, and therefore the oil business will only deteriorate from that point forward. It will quickly mean the end of all oil producers except the very cheapest.
If you're going to go with conspiracy theories, China is desperate for oil and was openly allying with Venezuela, and so was, ironically, petrostate Russia, although that's ending (for now). I bet Putin is looking for contingency plans though. Even though Venezuela is not exactly the easiest to reach for either of them, but beggars can't be choosers. Preventing any progress here might have been worth a lot to both the US and the EU. And, yes, I know how it sounds, but this will be pretty helpful with the Ukraine war. Yes, really.
Of course leftist tankies will be mad the billionaire fake-communist "revolution" that started with Chavez and should have ended 20 years ago is now very likely over. Of course, most Venezuelans (75% according to the opposition) would describe that revolution as a nightmare.
Of course I doubt 75% of Venezuelans wanted the US to resolve it.
I seriously doubt either China or Russia could manage to extract significant quantities of Venezuelan oil at a profit even if the US lifted all sanctions and completely forgot about Venezuela.
The costs of getting production set up at are so high compared to the relatively bleak outlook for the oil market, it's likely that Venezuelan oil isn't a hugely attractive proposition for anyone.
China is desperate, and also the enemy of essentially every source of oil ... "except" Venezuela (disregarding the fact that of course Maduro can't be trusted, and thus isn't really an ally of China. More accurately they're both desperate and might be able to help one another).
Russia is also desperate. And is extracting oil in Venezuela easier than doing it while under Ukrainian bombardment? Good question but we can summarize: extracting oil inside Russia is failing, thanks to Putin's 3-day special military operation ... and they've already had to import fuel twice in the past 6 months, despite how utterly ridiculous that is: the country that out-produced Saudia Arabia when it comes to oil needed to import fuel.
China is moving away from oil at such a pace that any massive development of first the extraction technologies for Venezuela and then the actual infrastructure would probably take too long to be particularly useful.
Venezuela is also simply too far from China to be a reliable source of oil.
Yes because the only reason Chinese government officials would talk with Venezuela is because China wants to spin up large-scale oil production there? Literally no other reason they could possibly be talking, right?
The question is whether it's the majority of Venezuelans. I have no doubt that there are many who hate Maduro and his regime - for very good reasons - but that's true of many authoritarian countries that nevertheless have the "silent majority" tacitly supporting their regime.
There is the opposition vote result that showed us 75% wanted Maduro out. Of course you can ask, did that include having US forces remove him? On the other hand, you can bet a lot the result would have been even more than 75% if everybody wasn't afraid while voting in secret.
"Rules-based order" just means Washington makes up the rules and gives out the orders. The very phrase hints at its conceit. Why "Rules-based order" instead of "International law" ? Its because International law is something concrete, something you can point to and hold up as a standard. International law means UN, ICC, Geneva conventions, votes and parlimentary procedure. It means accountability and uniform application of said law. "Rules-based order" just gives a slightest hint of legitimacy while Washington and its cronies do whatever they want. "Rules-based order" means that the United States can invoke the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela, Cuba and all over its "backyard" i.e. South America, but Russia doing the same in Ukraine or China doing it in Taiwan is an affront to civillization.
What changed more recently is the mask has slipped off. They don't even pretend to give a plausible reason anymore because noone will ever buy it so why bother. "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." That is what we are witnessing now.
> What changed more recently is the mask has slipped off.
The mask has been off since the ICC came into existence (at the latest). The reason why the U.S. don’t recognize the ICC is because they know they’d be defendants there one second after.
I will admit i was slow to catch on. But watching the whole abominable horror show laid out - Gaza, Ukraine, Epstein, Trump coins, resorts, and ballrooms. Seeing the Nobel prize being given to the woman literally calling for Trump to invade her country and take their oil and cheering as her countrymen get bombed. And then seeing the media and liberal elites spin it as a snub against Trump as she dedicates the prize to him. I am ashamed that i was taken in for so long.
"Rules-based international world order" consists of just two rules:
1. The Western countries (basically meaning USA makes the decision) may attack any country.
2. Other countries may not defend themselves nor attack any country.
Iraq, Iraq (several separate agressions on Iraq, that is not a typo), Afghanistan, Cuba, Serbia, Libya, Sirya, Venezuela... the list goes on, Venezuela is of no particular significance here.
Hungary, Chechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan, Ichkeria, Ukraine, Syria... The list goes on
If you're genuinely curious dig into the protests 2014, who won the election, who asked her supporters to take to the streets, and what has she been advocating for for a long time before.
It's all about Crimea and the black sea fleet and pipelines. Every time the same conflict, as Orwell put it: We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Edit: Instead of down-voting, tell me where I'm wrong. All of the facts are public information and you won't even have to leave Wikipedia.
I'll bite: speaking for myself, I can't figure out what point you are trying to make
First sentence says to look up 2014 protests and "her" supporters, second sentence says "it's" about the Black Sea and Crimea. Third sentence "we've" always been at war with Eurasia
> First sentence says to look up 2014 protests and "her" supporters, second sentence says "it's" about the Black Sea and Crimea
Yulia Tymoshenko (pro-West), she urged her supporters to take to the streets when the pro-Russian candidate won the election. For a long time she wanted to withdraw from the Russian/Ukrainian deal that the Black Sea Fleet could be in Crimea until 202? (can't remember the exact year right now).
When those protests erupted Russia (unofficially) sent forces to protect their interests, Crimea. The conflict then escalated to the invasion.
> Third sentence "we've" always been at war with Eurasia
We as in the West, are always at war with the east. We want a world order where we are at the top of the food chain and we'll stop any attempt to rise. If we're going to prosper the rest of the world has to remain as cheap labor.
Look into any conflict this and the previous century and you'll see the same pattern. It's always been a game och risk between the East and the West.
One interesting thing to look into is which countries along the Russian border are not Nato members. Correlate this to where there has been pro-Western protests and even coup attempts in the last decade.
The world is run by psychopaths and they have most of their populations living in ignorance of how geopolitics actually work. My most important principle in life is to judge "my side" harder. Russia and China don't have to be our enemies, but a country is easier to run if there's an external threat. And that's why Oceania in Orwells' 1984 is always at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia.
It's a big subject and it's difficult to summarize in a comment, that's why I listed a few questions to look into. I can dump facts and events all I want but the best thing one can do is to look into these conflicts themselves and find the patterns. It's always about who's allied with who, and who's extracting the resources. Gas/oil/minerals/power.
We were fine with Saddam (that we put in power in the first place) trying to exterminate the kurds, but mention leaving the petrodollar, oh no you didn't.
Thank you for the clarification. Given that the current context is comparing Ukraine to Venezuela, and Venezuela's opposition leader is a woman and there were protests in 2014, I had no idea you were talking about Tymoshenko.
According to West, not allowed. However, the West does not exist anymore, and we have two different ideological camps within it. According to USA, it’s bad, but it did not hurt American interests, so a good deal is possible. According to EU, foreign policy of which is hijacked by Baltic right, it is still not allowed, but… Deep currents indicate that as soon as it’s done with formal condemnations, it is desirable that business will resume as usual.
There’s massive propaganda effort painting the picture of imminent invasion, so opinion polls are naturally reflecting that. I doubt that there was ever a reason for Finland to worry about it. It’s just a convenient narrative for politicians, mainly on the right. But I was not saying that it’s only right leaning voters think this way. Just pointed out that we have Kallas as head of EU diplomacy and few other vocal politicians from Baltic right wing parties, and they are fixated on Russian threat, which is necessary for their political survival.
Plenty of European businesses still operate in Russia or have set up their exit for easy return via Dubai legal entities. Also Belgium fiercely resisting confiscation of Russian assets etc.
>Also Belgium fiercely resisting confiscation of Russian assets etc
Isn't this literally them not wanting to be left holding the paper bag?
What businesses are doing, I don't know, I am more aware of what states are doing. What're your thoughts on the expansion of military expenditure? Let Ukraine die, keep ourselves defended?
> Isn't this literally them not wanting to be left holding the paper bag?
It’s telling that they consider this a possibility. If EU wanted it, they could protect Belgium. But anticipation of business as usual means that whoever distances from such decisions better, will do better.
„Let Ukraine die“ decision was made in 2022, when NATO chose not to engage directly and not to switch to war economy, rapidly scaling production of military equipment and supplies. In NATO vs Russia war, Russia had no chances, but it quickly became Ukraine vs Russia war with token Western support, where Ukraine has no chances in the long term. As for increase in military spending, it’s necessary, but whatever is done, is insufficient. It is barely enough for containment of Russia, and EU needs independent operation in Middle East and Africa, pushing out USA from the region (whatever America does there, always ricocheting on Europe, so they should be denied action without approval of allies)
It is not like citizens of Iran decide to attack Israel or like sponsoring terrorist orgs attacking Israel. I am not sure if Russians freely vote in referendum to attack Ukraine. These decisions are made by despots ruling these countries and then their citizens suffer. Either they die in trenches or suffer economic misery. What for? China too can live without Taiwan. Chinese people do not need to have another island belonging to their country. Only despots wants to have statues raised after them, or write their names in history books, because all other things: Power, Money, Sex they already have.
>the invasion had broad popular support at the beginning.
According to whom?
You should understand that public opinion surveys in authoritarian countries are problematic. In autocracies, people might want to hide their opinions and give socially desirable answers that conform to the official government position for fear of facing repression or deviating from the consensus view.
According to my own relatives, friends, and acquaintances in Russia, where I'm from. You don't need to tell me about "hiding opinions". The majority support is regardless of all that, though.
This is a ridiculously small sample to tell me that "the invasion had broad popular support at the beginning". It had a broad support in your own circles and you casually extrapolated it to the whole population.
According to my own relatives, friends, and acquaintances in Russia (where I'm from) – no one supports or ever supported in the beginning the total idiocracy which is happening.
Expectations are higher, competition is stiffer, and the gap between bottom and top end has grown, but by and large (especially in the US), the middle class quality of life has gone up.
Obviously specific regions that failed to transition out of low value-add manufacturing and agriculture have suffered, but the vast majority of Americans live in cities doing or supporting high value work.
It's not even competition anymore. It's a screaming void that deafens everyone, causing them to reach for the nearest "acceptable" thing just to quiet the endless cacophony of human struggling.
Yes this is a big problem but a large part of this is the total elimination of starter homes from the market. I.e. they would be able to afford the types of homes that earlier generations started in, but those homes simply don't exist anymore.
It's kind of a quality of life degradation, but it's a bit more complex than just "an attainable item is no longer attainable." It has never been normal to buy a 2600 sqft, 4 bedroom home at the start of a career.
It's not that starter homes were eliminated or were torn down, it's that construction stopped in cities. The downzonings of prior generations, combined with the limited ability to expand by car travel, finally hit its limit and the urban planning apparatus was in complete capture of people who didn't want the built environment to change.
The reason construction slowed down so much is that developers fear another 2008. We have just barely gotten back onto a historically normal-ish pace of construction: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
And this talk of "just build build build," while not wrong per se, overlooks the fact that of course prices will come down, which then discourages construction. The system is self-equilibrating. 2008 reset the equilibrium point very low for 15 years, and now the nature of the costs of construction (labor and land) means it is not advantageous for anyone to build starter homes, and it's hardly advantageous to build homes at all.
Restrictive zoning is a problem and would be a very tidy explanation of all the woes of residential in the US, but there really isn't much evidence for it mattering that much in the grand scheme of things.
The single most important factor in home prices is local income levels. This gets baked into both land prices and labor costs, which then makes it very difficult to profitably build much, and completely unprofitable to build entry level homes.
The building industry never really recovered after 2008 because the only surviving companies were extremely cautious. In order to get more builders, there needs to be more places to build, and entry into the industry needs to be easier. It's all permitting, zoning, and discretionary processes stopping housing from being built where it's wanted to be built.
Well I've shared a statistical analysis and raw data series backing my points and directly contradicting yours. On the flip side I guess we have "trust me bro."
To the extent "it's all [any individual cause]", that cause is rising incomes. The second major cause of rising housing prices is cost of inputs (labor, land, material). Zoning definitely plays a role, but again: there's just no evidence that "solving zoning" will actually solve affordability. We should do it anyway because it'll solve all sorts of other problems in our built environment, but there's not good evidence affordability is one of them.
You ar also doing "trust me bro" with a statistical analysis that at most shows that prices rise with wages when supplies are constrained. Which, yes! That's what everyone says! K shaped recoveries happen when there's unequal access to opportunity, and supple constraints in access to the geography of good incomes is exactly the sort of supply constraints. Further, in order to get their weak results they do silly things like transform "supply constraints" into an indicator variable, and on the basis of that single odd regression try to overturn a huge body of literature showing the opposite.
Yet this one strange paper keeps getting cited as if it were God's own truth, the holy grail of economics that changes everything that was known before.
Supply restrictions are not binary, though that's how your paper treats them, and they perform none of the causal analysis that would be needed to extend their analysis to the conclusions you are trying to draw.
Here's a random paper with completely different results that agrees with the rest of the field:
I remember the last time the "we can't change zoning" folks passed around a paper like the NBER paper you shared, and it was one about transit-oriented-development in Chicago, where allowing small upzonings close didn't change pricing much. It was contra to the vast majority of the literature, covered only a small geographic area with fully adequate housing supply, yet for a few years nobody could suggest doing the obvious zoning reforms without people claiming that Chicago proved that upzoning doesn't change pricing.
And again, supply will always be constrained below "affordability" by virtue of there being no profit available at affordable price points given the costs of inputs. So yes, if we imagine a world where supply isn't constrained first by the actual cost structure of construction, then clearly artificial constraints are the sole problem and solving them would solve the problem overall. But that's not the world we live in!
From your random paper:
> Fig. 5 shows the event study results for the change in log hedonic rents. In contrast to the housing supply, we find no statistically significant effect of upzoning on rents.
So it looks like your paper actually agrees with mine.
As I've said over and over: we should overhaul zoning for sure. However there is not good evidence that will solve affordability, and there's basically zero evidence that it is the cause of "all" the problems, as you so boldly claimed.
> I wouldn't call it "some inflation". The living standard of the western middle class has been on the decline for a long, long time.
IMHO the main problem nowadays, especially facing young people, is housing.
Otherwise there is probably never been a greater time to be alive, generally speaking, than right now. If you believe there is, can you outline the year(s) in question and how they were better?
As for inflation, using Bank of Canada numbers (since I'm in CA), $100 of goods/services from 1975-2000 increased by 220% to $320.93, while $100 of goods/services from 2000-2025 increased by 71% to $171.22.
While unpleasant, and higher than that of what many young(er) people have experienced, it is hardly at a crazy level. The lack of people's experience of higher rates is simply more evidence as to how stable things have generally been:
Interestingly, this is not just flaunting international law. It is a blatant violation of federal domestic law in the USA itself: Congress is the only body that can declare war, and they have not done so. The Presidency has no right whatsoever to attack a foreign country without a declaration of war.
While yes, Congress authorized the "War on Terror", there is very obviously no possible justification for applying that to the case of Venezuela.
My point is that —- regardless of appropriateness —- this is about as far from “unprecedented” as can be imagined.
Congress didn’t declare ware on Syria, or Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or any number of other African countries when the US attacked them during the Biden administration.
That’s not what I was saying, but I didn’t argue when smarter men than I said exactly that:
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
- Lysander Spooner
Liberia has/had a nearly identical constitution and look at them. It was just a roadmap for what the US could become if we became even more savage like them. It was never the Constitution that made the USA special, in other hands you got what we're getting now.
You always needed a populace that respected life, liberty, and property above all in order to have a prayer of it working out; that is long gone if it ever existed.
Ah yes, using the Coast Guard's aircraft carrier, stealth fighters, and their famous "Delta Force" commandos. I bet they even got a warrant to kick in Maduro's door and read him his rights!
Panama and Granada in the 80s weren't that fundamentally different. And before that US had a very long history of invading or intervening in Latin American countries due to various often dubious reasons.
If anything the last few decades might have been the exception.
Just like how Denmark and Greenland stole American land that happens to be where Greenland is. Or Canada.
Seriously though, even the imperial ambitions from the guy feels racist :)
I guess Turkey can stop worrying on thanksgiving days.
I have a lot of conflicting views with both the "left" and the "right" these days, but it seems the so-called "conservatives" are not that conservative in their ambitions, no?
> the way they don't even try to convince us this is necessary anymore is a sign that wherever the line is, we let it slip too far
A lot of Americans don't care. They either actually don't care. Or they sort of care, but are too lazy and nihilistic to bother doing anything about it.
Like, this entire exercise is a leveraged wager by the Trump administration that this will not cost them the Senate in any of these states next year [1].
As an American, I think we make this excuse too often. People have opposed and overthrown their governments more effectively under much harsher circumstances.
What data do you have that they don’t care? Waging a war is a pretty massive thing to not care about. I would think that someone would either be positive or negative towards it. Because even if they don’t care about invading countries per se they would presumably care about what their presumed tax money is spent on.
Of course being “nihilistic” is a different matter.
> Or they sort of care, but are too lazy and nihilistic to bother doing anything about it.
Typical.
Doing anything about US foreign interventions is a very tall order in a country where the vast majority are politically disenfranchised (with income and wealth as a proxy). It’s difficult enough for domestic affairs, like getting universal healthcare. Much harder to fight the war machine.
Americans did put up a fight against the interventionism of the Reagan administration. But that didn’t stop the funding of the Contras. “All it did” was force the interventions to become clandestine. (A big contrast to this admin.)
But ordinary Americans do have the largest power in all of the world to fight the war machine of their own country. That ought to be encouraged. But as usual we see the active encouragement of nihilism from comments where A Lot Of X are deemed to be useless for this particular purpose. Ah what’s the point, People Are Saying that everyone around me are useless or politically katatonic. Typical.
It’s funny how the America First, America Only crowd is cheering on this shameless regime change whose ultimate goal isn’t about drugs or democracy, but getting access to oil and minerals to make the Trump family richer.
And that’s so why there is a lack of effort to justify it. The right has been compromised and will support anything the party does - deporting citizens, invading countries, making things unaffordable with tariffs.
I have seen many people on X who have a profile saying America First or America Only or both post messages supporting the boat strikes or “thanking” Hegseth or whatever. Among big influencers - Matt Walsh, Benny Johnson, others have all supported the narrative in one form or the other. For example Johnson pushed the conspiracy theory that Venezuela rigs elections in America. Often they use dishonest language to shill their support for what’s going on - “we don’t want a new war but here’s ten reasons why Venezuela is bad”
> There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal
There might be a local debate about the legality in the US. But from the outside perspective in terms of international law, there is not much to debate. Unless i missed some UN resolution, the US has no jurisdiction in Venezuela.
>There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal
Or maybe there wouldn't be any debate and people will move on to the next bombastic thing he does. Populists get away with everything by simply not engaging, people get tired and seek new entertainment and there's no actual checks and balances beyond the decency. When someone has no claim of decency, they are untouchable. No one will ever arrest them, stop them or deny them anything because they can just replace those who do not obey. Maduro, Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and many others are made from the same cloth.
This is a consequence of the society concentrating on its internal culture war. International politics became irrelevant to most voters; they don't really have any personal stake in it anymore, or they at least don't feel so. Their kids won't be drafted to war.
It was one or two elections ago that we entirely dropped the pretense of dignity.
Quite refreshing, actually.
Earlier today I heard the argument that idealism was promoted in the West because it encourages a separation from reality and makes people easier to control.
I consider myself an idealist. I just don't believe that ignorance and delusion are the means by which an ideal can be brought about.
It seems like a misunderstanding of utilitarianism to use it as an excuse to shut down any complaints about something as long as the overall societal benefit is positive. If we actually engage with these issues, we can potentially shift things into an even more positive direction. Why would a utilitarian be against that?
I don't think anyone here tried to use it that way, but it's useful to have some framing around things. It might seem macabre to see people argue "Well, if it killed 10 kids but saved 10,000, doesn't that mean it's good?" without understanding the deeper perspective a person like that would hold, which essentially is a utilitarian.
And I don't think any utilitarian would be against "something with some harm but mostly good can be made to do even less harm".
But the person I initially replied to, obviously doesn't see it as "some harm VS much good" (which we could argue if it's true or not), and would say that any harm + any good is still worth considering if the harm is worth it, besides the good it could do.
>I don't think anyone here tried to use it that way
That's certainly the impression you gave with your response. You didn't engage with the clear example of harmful behavior or debate what various numbers on either side of the equation would mean. Your approach was to circumvent OP's direct question to talk philosophy. That suggests you think there are some philosophical outlooks that could similarly sidestep the question of a therapist pushing people to kill themselves, which is a rather simple and unambiguous example of harm that could be reduced.
>you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric
This is such a bizarre trend that seems to have gotten much worse recently. I don't know if it's dropping empathy levels or rising self-importance, but many people now find the idea of someone genuinely disagreeing as a completely foreign idea. Instead of meeting a different viewpoint with some variation of "agree to disagree" many more people now seem to jump to "you actually agree with me, you're just pretending otherwise".
Non-tongue-in-cheek discussion of the Mandela Effect is a parallel phenomenon. "My memory can't possibly be wrong, this is evidence of our understanding of physics being wrong!"
Just a couple small things that make me worry about the future of society in the midst of a discussion about one huge thing that makes me worry about the future of society in AI.
As a variant, I recently stumbled upon a post that basically sums up to "people who disagree with me on AI are clearly blinded by their prejudice, it's so sad."
Your argument is dumb because it's objectively better to optimize x conditioned on y than optimize y conditioned on x.
Maybe the worst variant of this is where people don't realize they're actually arguing for different things but because it's the same general topic they assume everything is the same (duals are common). I feel like this describes many political arguments and it feels in part intentional...
I'm reminded of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate[1] that Bari Weiss signed only a few years ago, now she's spiking stories like this one on CECOT for showing the current administration in a negative light.
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
Weiss got her start screaming about how various college professors should be fired. There has never once been a moment in her career where she seriously cared about open debate.
Literally not a journalist. She went from the opinion pages to writing opinion on substack. And for "some reason" was put in charge of a news organization.
She has worked as a staff editor in newsrooms, most notably at Tablet. It’s not accurate to say her career has solely been in the opinion section.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
Her upward trajectory has been facilitated mainly through pleasing select silicon valley billionaires by echoing their views back to them in her ironically named The Free Press outlet, which they also helped found.
This really is the future of journalism. Just make content that a few deranged billionaires like and rise up and up and up and up. CBS doesn't have to care whether ordinary people like it. What matters is the asshole with billions of dollars.
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
Hundreds of comments and the only one speaking the truth is downvoted. Bari Weiss is unqualified and the only reason she was put into this position is to be a useful idiot for Israel.
You can't understand technology without understanding the people behind it. I always wonder about all these non-bot people who support her: is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick? Is there something else? I never quite get it.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
>is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick?
It's both. That's one of the things that's difficult to suss out and therefore have a plan to engage. There's plausible deniability on both ends of that spectrum. Even in the high positions in the administration, there's a smattering of True Believers in amongst the grifters.
> just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions if I tried.)
The signatories have spent years attacking free expression. A particularly acute case is when it comes to things like advocating for the end of israeli occupation in palestine, but there are many others. Whining about BLM is a particularly common approach for Thomas Chatterton Williams.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
I think you're really off base. A quick search about what Williams has said about censorship on the right seems to undermine your one non-weiss example [1]. There were more than a hundred signatories from across a fairly wide political spectrum (and the letter itself was anti-Trump). The handful of signatories that I follow have squarely denounced right wing censoriousness - I'm open to hearing that I'm seeing a non-representative sample, but you didn't provide any useful info on that front.
Notice how this article frames the entire thing as caused by the left and happily ignores the fact that what is happening under Trump is not new. Were the excesses of the left the cause of the Stop Woke Act in Florida? The right has been screaming about firing professors since God and Man at Yale was published. In my opinion, this is not anything resembling a serious accounting of the threats to speech from the right.
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
In terms of the actual topic, I would be shocked if Williams approved of spiking the CECOT 60 mins story, if it is in fact politically motivated as many suspect. And I'm not particularly a "fan" of Williams or anything, though I've heard him on a couple of podcasts.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
So, can we see him writing about how this was a bad thing?
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
I wonder how the proponents of banning books like this don't have an "Are we the baddies?" moment. What precedent is there for history to look kindly on this type of behavior? Is there a single fiction book that you can point to that was banned in that past that let's say 60% of people today would agree was necessary (i.e. it would be in schools if there wasn't a ban) and appropriate to ban? It always seems like within a generation or two, most people agree the prior efforts to ban books were wrong, then a little time elapses, and we start banning new books again.
The people screaming at school board meetings about gay characters in books aren't going to have an "are we the baddies" moment. They'd just ban gay people from existing in public entirely if they could.
school boards are elected, county and state governments are elected, if you want a policy changed at a school then change it. This is like saying a policy requiring a school uniform bans wearing flip-flops. Here's the top 10 list of banned shoes...
Call me when you're arrested or fined for buying/selling any book in US.
It's interesting that people are responding like this rather than answering my question. I know how democracy works and that includes the occasional instances of tyranny of the majority.
That still doesn't address my original question. Is there historic precedent for this type of micromanaging of school libraries (if you're adamant that we shouldn't use the B word) that most of us would still agree with today? Because many of the books on the list seem more likely to follow the path of eventual school classics like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird than they are to continue to be banned decades into the future.
Freedom of speech (in the US) protects book publishing too, or do you think school boards are elected, county and state governments are above the constitution?
Curation is not the issue. The librarians already selected and purchased the books, the state is forcing the librarians to remove them for political reasons. The state could hire qualified activist librarians who only want politically conservative "approved" books who curate only those books, but I will let you guess why they can't find qualified conservative librarians.
Who said curation was the issue? Where is the assumption that libraries don't have political reasons even coming from? The state handpicks librarians? What is with the implication that there are no "qualified conservative librarians"????
What in the world are you talking about? Why are you spouting a bunch of bigotry that isn't relevant to anything?
I'm very sorry but a bunch of bigots getting on the school board still shouldn't be able to unilaterally say "there must be absolutely no representation of gay people in any books in the library because the presence of LGBT content is pornographic."
See the others here not only justifying the censorship, but downplaying that they're even censored. "Oh they're just not stocked? It's not a ban.", etc.
How are children supposed to develop into adults, if they are denied reading about the experiences of others?
I am not a proponent of any of these bans, but it seems like someone needs to decide which books are featured at schools, and these 'bans' are just vetoes of certain books enacted by parents or school boards. I am not sure why a librarian or some school administrator should have complete authority to select any books they may prefer. This seems similar to a curriculum, in that the citizens and/or school board direct the educators what they should be (and should not be) teaching.
> I am not sure why a librarian or some school administrator should have complete authority to select any books they may prefer.
Because it's their explicit job function. Librarians aren't hired to watch over unchanging collections of books like cryptkeepers. They have budgets to buy books with.
There are no "banned books" in the US. Using that term is inaccurate, and IMO a bit of an insult to people living in countries that actually do ban books.
What there actually are, are books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries because they don't think the content is appropriate for children. I would assume this happens in every country.
>books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries
You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.
I don't know, maybe they are colluding, but it is funny to default to that assumption over both platforms just delivering you the same content because you have the same behavior across both apps.
Notably, this started happening the day that I made my TikTok account public. My Instagram feed began to be a copy of my TikTok feed. The exact same videos. Even after changing my Tiktok back to private and deleting all of my followers, the feeds are still identical, every single day. My behavior is not. On Instagram, I follow and interact with very different accounts than on TikTok. It seems to me that Instagram is buying or accessing TikTok's data, and it is not through advertising providers, because the identical content is coming directly from Instagram/TikTok and not promoted ads.
There are three possibilities though. One is Instagram copying TikTok, without their knowledge, the other is Instagram copying your TikTok feed with their knowledge but not their blessing, and finally Instagram copying your TikTok feed with TikTok's knowledge and their blessing. If we take a look at http://TikTok.com/robots.txt, it seems if you make your TikTok public, TikTok is happy to let Instagram take a look at it (but not a number of AI crawlers). What Instagram does with it is up to them, but it's in robots.txt.
The simplest explanation would be that Instagram crawled my TikTok's account's followers and is curating my Instagram reels based on that point in time.
However that's not what happened, because my "following list" is restricted to be viewable by "only me", even though my account was public. "Public" just means that you can view my videos without me accepting a follower request. And I don't have any videos anyway.
So I can only deduce that setting it to "public" flipped some bit in either Instagram or TikTok's backend to where now they both are sharing the same or very similar data to curate my feeds.
In the book "careless people" it is highlighted that Facebook embedded spyware in their app which tracked other apps that were installed/used on the phone. This allowed them to figure out that so many of their users were installing WhatsApp, and enabled the legendary WhatsApp purchase. It is very much possible that Instagram is reading some sort of temporary files created by TikTok and extracts data using this method.
Facebook/Meta has a proven track record of fetching all data from your phone, even when abusing security vulnerabilities to do so. And the clowns at Apple can't even fix RCEs in their network-exposed applications, I'm not convinced the separation between apps is flawless.
Do you work on ad platforms? If you did, that imagination would be reined in quite a bit.
The gist of it is that the platforms carefully curate what data they provide to their customers. They don't want to give anything low level away, both for compliance reasons and because it would undermine their own business. Facebook makes money by charging for access to their users, not by giving away enough information about them for one of their customers to become a competitor.
Almost all of the data the platforms provide is 'How well is your marketing campaign doing and among whom' - on a high level. There are issues with poor designs leaking information when the campaign only hit 20 people, but as a general rule of thumb, but that's an exception, not the rule.
Not sure if they're explicitly sharing data, but there does seem to be something that's sharing data across the platforms. When I buy something from Tiktok, the ads for the same thing shows up on my instagram almost instantly. Doesn't necessarily mean they're directly sharing data of course, could be a third party too. But as a consumer that has very little difference for me.
If you buy something from Tiktok, you presumably visit the merchant's website, which almost surely will have chosen to have a tracking pixel that sends data to FB (Instagram). You can read a bit about how tracking pixels work here: https://jvns.ca/blog/how-tracking-pixels-work/
In this case it's not Tiktok and Instagram that are sharing data with each other, but the product website that is choosing to share data with both of them.
It's because you are the exact target demographic consumer for that product, and it's visible in your behavior patterns when using your apps combined with what they know about you (age, sex, location, demographics, etc.)
Much more likely an explicit retargeting ad network that doesn't realise they already bought it.
Retargeting has been a thing for like 15 plus years now. Visit website for knives, ad network tracking cookie notes that down, same ad network later serves you ads for the same knives. Or some convoluted data sharing network that has the same outcome these days.
It's not much more likely. People don't realize but demographic targeting works really well. When you are a certain age, certain gender, living in a certain area, with a few other inferred characteristics, you're very likely to be talking about, thinking about, and buying a small set of product types
I think the OP knows best what happened to them, so I will leave it up to them to decide. But to get targeted for a product you just looked feels like pretty standard retargetting.
I don't disagree with your point that demographics can be very good and sometimes uncanny, that aspect I agree with. It is just the timing that leads me to believe it is retargetting.
I'm very hesitant to make those sorts of accusations, but the writing has multiple hallmarks of LLMs and this is one of three articles posted today by the same author to that blog before noon their local time. I guess this is just what the internet is now, constantly wondering whether you're reading actual thoughts of another human being or whether it is just LLM output generated to stick between ads.
Dyslexia is just the overall name for a learning disability that causes difficulty with reading or writing. There is no unified cause or group of causes, it's all based on symptoms.
Therefore, the only things that will "work" for all dyslexics are things that fundamentally make reading and writing easier for everyone and not just dyslexics. So something like a font can help in the same way some fonts are easier to read than others, but the idea of a "dyslexia font" is a little silly.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc.
Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Good luck with that. When 3/4 of the world laughs at your patent what is the point of patents? IP only works when everyone agrees to it. When they don't it's just a handicap on the ones who do that benefits nobody.
This is a perfect example of the power and problems with LLMs.
I took the narcissistic approach of searching for myself. Here's a grade of one of my comments[1]:
>slg: B- (accurate characterization of PH’s “networking & facade” feel, but implicitly underestimates how long that model can persist)
And here's the actual comment I made[2]:
>And maybe it is the cynical contrarian in me, but I think the "real world" aspect of Product Hunt it what turned me off of the site before these issues even came to the forefront. It always seemed like an echo chamber were everyone was putting up a facade. Users seemed more concerned with the people behind products and networking with them than actually offering opinions of what was posted.
>I find the more internet-like communities more natural. Sure, the top comment on a Show HN is often a critique. However I find that more interesting than the usual "Wow, another great product from John Developer. Signing up now." or the "Wow, great product. Here is why you should use the competing product that I work on." that you usually see on Product Hunt.
I did not say nor imply anything about "how long that model can persist", I just said I personally don't like using the site. It's a total hallucination to claim I was implying doom for "that model" and you would only know that if you actually took the time to dig into the details of what was actually said, but the summary seems plausible enough that most people never would.
The LLM processed and analyzed a huge amount of data in a way that no human could, but the single in-depth look I took at that analysis was somewhere between misleading and flat out wrong. As I said, a perfect example of what LLMs do.
And yes, I do recognize the funny coincidence that I'm now doing the exact thing I described as the typical HN comment a decade ago. I guess there is a reason old me said "I find that more interesting".
I'm not so sure; that may not have been what you meant, but that doesn't mean it's not what others read into it. The broader context is HN is a startup forum and one of the most common discussion patterns is 'I don't like it' that is often a stand-in for 'I don't think it's viable as-is'. Startups are default dead, after all.
With that context, if someone were to read your comment and be asked 'does this person think the product's model is viable in the long run' I think a lot of people would respond 'no'.
And this is a perfect example of how some people respond to LLMs, bending over backwards to justify the output like we are some kids around a Ouija board.
The LLM isn't misinterpreting the text, it's just representing people who misinterpreted the text isn't the defense you seem to think it is.
And your response here is a perfect example of confidently jumping to conclusions on what someone's intent is... which is exactly what you're saying the LLM did to you.
I scoped my comment specifically around what a reasonable human answer would be if one were asked the particular question it was asked with the available information it had. That's all.
Btw I agree with your comment that it hallucinated/assumed your intent! Sorry I did not specify that. This was a bit of a 'play stupid games win stupid prizes' prompt by the OP. If one asks an imprecise question one should not expect a precise answer. The negative externality here is reader's takeaways are based on false precision. So is it the fault of the question asker, the readers, the tool, or some mix? The tool is the easiest to change, so probably deserves the most blame.
I think we'd both agree LLMs are notoriously overly-helpful and provide low confidence responses to things they should just not comment on. That to me is the underlying issue - at the very least they should respond like humans do not only in content but in confidence. It should have said it wasn't confident about its response to your post, and OP should have thus thrown its response out.
Rarely do we have perfect info, in regular communications we're always making assumptions which affect our confidence in our answers. The question is what's the confidence threshold we should use? This is the question to ask before the question of 'is it actually right?', which is also an important question to ask, but one I think they're a lot better at than the former.
Fwiw you can tell most LLMs to update its memory to always give you a confidence score 0.0-1.0. This helps tremendously, it's pretty darn accurate, it's something you can program thresholds around, and I think it should be built in to every LLM response.
The way I see it, LLMs have lots and lots of negative externalities that we shouldn't bring into this world (I'm particularly sensitive to the effects on creative industries), and I detest how they're being used so haphazardly, but they do have some uses we also shouldn't discount and figure out how to improve on. The question is where are we today in that process?
The framework I use to think about how LLMs are evolving is that of transitioning mediums. Like movies started as a copy/paste of stage plays before they settled into the medium and understand how to work along the grain of its strengths & weaknesses to create new conventions. Speech & text are now transitioning into LLMs. What is the grain we need to go along?
My best answer is the convention LLMs need to settle into is explicit confidence, and each question asked of them should first be a question of what the acceptable confidence threshold is for such a question. I think every question and domain will have different answers for that, and we should debate and discuss that alongside any particular answer.
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