For the record, and I am on the record, here. I've said it many times. I think Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are guilty of war crimes, and I have consistently supported the idea of their prosecution for over a decade. So I face the implication of my moral hypocrisy here, with amusement.
I think the likelihood that this is a coordinated distraction is very low. Pretty sure the empaneled grand jury, which is a year old, had no idea they were part of a grant conspiracy to distract from a crisis on behalf of the fiat system. That's just silly confused, conspiratorial nonsense.
What war crimes has Biden committed that Trump didn't? Did the drone strikes not continue under Trump? Did Trump not order cruise missile strikes in Syria that resulted in civilian deaths?
I note you didn't include Trump in that list.
Fun fact: the International Criminal Court's indictment of Putin for war crimes, creates a treaty bound obligation by quite a large number of states to arrest Putin, should he land in their country. This includes basically all of Europe, Canada, Australia and many others.
The United States is not one of these counties, as the US has not ratified its membership in the ICC treaty, even though it is a signatory to the accord.
Trump has announced to the world that he's been indicted in the Stormy Daniels bribery case, and is being arrested on Tuesday. Wasn't hoping for a week of political violence in the US, given it being my birthday and all. But here we are.
This is one of the major theories, yes. I'm weirdly skeptical of it. But that might only be because I'm too romantic about how the human behavioral utility function in our genetics works.
It's a very abstract problem. Because we have only one empirical datapoint. Which is our own existence. You can't prove a negative about the existence of other intelligent civilizations, their time horizons for emergence, yet unknown constraints on interstellar travel, etc.
At the end of the day, Drake's equation sort of bootstraps from
The Law of Big Numbers and then goes from there. So it's a fundamentally statistical argument for which we have no empirical ground for nominator and denominator in the function. Well, we know the nominator is a minimum value of 1, because we exist.
I want to be clear: I am somewhat agnostic on whether this is true. I lean more towards the Rare Earth Hypothesis, myself. But it's something to think about.
The metastability envelope being limited in civilizational systems at a critical complexity threshold -- where corrective mechanisms for coordination cannot cope, leading to the self-destruction of all technological civilizations. This is referred to as the "Great Filter" resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
Yeah, almost all of our problems to some extent are problems of our collective making. There's certain things we cannot be said to hold collective accountability for as species. We don't control the weather. We don't control the movement of plate tectonics. We cannot control whether some celestial event such as a massive asteroid impacts renders the planet uninhabitable -- although our technological capacity for planetary defense is advancing.
But everything we create introduces problems. Even the simple invention of software. It created the problem of programming errors -- which today could have civilization-scale consequences and has made cybersecurity such an important problem.
I could be wrong of course, but I'm not sure we could have had an alternate history where we reached the levels of prosperity we have, and avoided the emergence of system-dependent problems, and the compounding of systemic risks that propagate through the interplay of these systems.
I think there's reason to believe that this universal reality can be found in the second law of thermodynamics itself.
Don't give me too much credit. I'm cribbing heavily from Hobbes and Locke right now.
That's right. I think the insistence by many ideologues that there's a very simple way out, and if the world just adopted that thing, all of these problems would fade away, as vestiges of a tired, corrupt system, where an elite manufacturer these problems that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Sometimes things like that are true. They're certainly true in many respects with regards to human rights and flourishing in autocratic regimes. They're also true to a lesser extent with examples of political-economic capture in liberal democracies. But this is all besides the point.
Whenever people think about "the system" as an obstacle, the important implication is that system is a obstacle to a thing. What is that thing? Often, the assumption is that thing is a state of nature of organic human flourishing that would happen absent these imposed constraints. But that's a implicit statement about the shape of the state of nature that has no empirical grounding whatsoever. Which I think, generally makes it fair to characterize such belief systems as utopian and/or fanatical.
My biggest worry is not even about AI or fiat or war or whatever. It's really an abstract worry about the human predilection for simple, concise, models and rules to explain and govern the world. When what we've done is built a society of such complexity, that there's no stable set of parameters within the limits of human cognition that is stable.
Some libertarians and anarchists think that formulation is the non-aggression principle, self-ownership and homesteading. Some progressives think it's about taxing the rich and deconstructing all aspects of culture and society. Religious conservatives think it's a set of divine rules.
I happen to think they're all wrong, and for similar epistemic reasons, setting aside the very fun metaphysical assumptions creating the various axiomatic groundings for this normative systems of mediating social conflict.