Chris in the weeds

The mistake they made is appointing him the leader of Labour instead of the Conservatives, Reform or the Greens.

The bad thing about bad words is the communicative intent behind them, not the production of that particular sequence of sounds. The US seems to have gone a bit crazy about punishing the latter instead of the former.

People do know that Tourette's is involuntary, and that we don't imprison people in asylums unless they're a danger to themselves or others, right?

I don't doubt that most intelligence agencies are already using LLMs for data sorting or classification somehow, but ideally you wouldn't have those LLMs making judgements that could result in people getting detained without human review and court process involving admissible evidence.

Uh oh. Imagine being thrown in the gulag on a US holiday because ChatGPT scanned its scraped data decided you were insufficiently pro Trump.

What is even the moral or practical vision here, beyond Trump grabbing what he can easily take and leaving everyone else to live with the chaos and consequences?

And it's especially problematic when the outside force that wants to "save" you, according to some US senators, also backs a genocidal apartheid state that's waged more wars against Muslims than any other nearby state.

A country that seriously wanted regime change would look like it was in this for the long haul, would start publicly backing some domestic movement(s) so people knew what it was they were being asked to back etc. It would commit to a desired outcome.

If you rise up, what guarantee is there the US will still be attacking government forces in a month? Or will back what you want instead of imposing a new Shah or something?

Even if you want to help the Iranians who were protesting... imagine you're in their shoes. The US did nothing while they were slaughtered. Now it's done something, but who knows how long that will go on for. The military is still strong.

All of this boils down to: be honorable, be serious, and be predictable about your red lines and the consequences of crossing them

War is bad, but war as a silly game for bored presidents of superpowers is worse.

Trump is already talking as if he didn't really understand the magnitude of what he did, and expected to be able to just back out with no hard feelings whenever he wanted.

That is trivialising violence. Unless you're serious about deposing the regime and will formally commit to do so via a declaration of war, you shouldn't start a bombing campaign in the first place.

But also, on top: it's one thing to declare a war and have the will to fight one. To expect to fight one. It's another to assassinate a head of state casually as Trump and Israel did, then expect things to go back to normal next week.

Being seen as a good faith actor is really important. Defectors on this kind of thing dangerous, especially when they run powerful countries and not powerless entities.

Yes, this is what makes it especially egregious for me. It's one thing to end negotiations, declare war, *then* start a bombing campaign that kills the head of state. It's another to supposedly be negotiating and then assassinate a load of people.

Note: all this is also why you never push the fat guy in front of the train. The systematic impact of naive utilitarianism is horrific, no matter how justified you think you might be in casually discarding any kind of rule-based framework.

Note: all this is also why you never push the fat guy in front of the train. The systematic impact of naive utilitarianism is horrific, no matter how justified you think you might be in casually discarding any kind of rule-based framework.

It sounds kind of naive, but honour, honesty and predictability matter between states too. Trumpian defection and lying as a norm and not an occasional exception is a good way to bring the entire system down and raise the equilibrium level of global violence.

In future, when the US claims it wants to negotiate, you should immediately disperse your entire command structure and start preparing for imminent war, I guess.

Reportedly, the reason many of the officials gathered was to discuss the negotiations to avoid war. As it often does, Israel used the pretext of good faith negotiations to then assassinate people. What do you think violating diplomatic norms like this does to the ability to minimise war?

The US has been opposed to decapitating the Russian government. If Ukraine took out Putin for his crimes against humanity, should the US also endorse it as a good thing?

If you're arguing from a moral framework and not blatant self interest, "country X did terrible things do we're justified in doing anything we want" has to apply not just for your enemies, but also for your friends.

imagine how they'd feel or respond if the Iranians had preemptively blown up the White House or Netanyahu because of the horrific crimes committed by their states.

And going back to Israel vs Iran: the general approach, and Trump's assumption of a rapid surrender, seems like a chronic failure of empathy. To understand the Iranian point of view, Americans only need to ...

Of course the global world of the US at its height also had terrible and unfair corners, but abandoning the idea that you need some kind of incredibly strong justification and ideally international consensus to blow up heads of state is a recipe for a lot more people ending up dead in the midterm.

Leaving that aside, the true reason for international norms is that the period before we had the international law model was *worse*. Chronic interstate violence has a terrible death toll. Globalisation suppressed much of it.

If you're going to argue for discarding norms of international relations because Iran has done things so terrible anything is justified, I think there is no valid argument to exclude Netanyahu and many senior decision makers around the repeated persecution and ethnic violence against Palestinians.

Although note that the terrorist bombings, pogroms and ethnic cleansing were started by those who went on to found Israel first, and since then Israel has killed orders of magnitude more of those they displaced than vice versa.