What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.
I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals
You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?
One reasonable possibility is they're referring to people like Ben-Gvir who have themselves claimed that Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank. They're the ones calling the shots right now. I don't know whether Zionists 78 years ago would've agreed, it's possible.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
Let's not forget that while some people like to point to "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea" as some "gotcha!" that some Palestians want to "exterminate" Israel...
it was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s just as ... oh, let me check, Netanyahu, was getting involved in all of this, formally becoming Likud's leader in 1993.
Then please explain in your own words what "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea" means?
And the destruction of Israel is the explicit goal of Hamas as stated in their charter.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and called for holy war to establish an Islamic state across historic Palestine.
Look, to be very clear: Hamas is absolutely a terrorist organization who has caused constant harm to both Israelis and the average Palestinian they purport to represent (there have been no elections since 2006, Hamas are the only people with weapons in Gaza, and the average citizen might as well be a hostage - and frankly they’d turn against Hamas a lot more if Israel didn’t steadily inflict collective punishment against them like turning off their electricity or even drinking water for days or weeks for actions of Hamas. All that is doing is making sympathizers of them).
"Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank."
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
> I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
Because that's what matters. The original Zionists aren't alive to ask what they think. Self-proclaimed Zionists are taking the West Bank and Gaza. In fact they've been kinda doing it for decades under previous governments, but more slowly. If there's some other kind of Zionism around, the most it's doing is complaining, and it's been outvoted.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
West Bank and Gaza are different situations. West Bank settlements have been popping up continuously. Settlers were in Gaza until they exited in 2005, but now that Israel's military occupies it again, Zionists believe it should be resettled. Sorry for CNN link, but it has direct quotes https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/middleeast/israel-far-right-g... To be clear they haven't done it yet, aside from some illegal (by Israeli law) attempts, but they're trying.
It's pretty obvious from the emotional response that you've got some kind of horse in the Israel-Hamas war that I don't, which is fine, but I'm not gonna get called a liar too. So bye.
It's true that Nazism lacks the religious aspect, and Zionism lacks the pagan aspect.
I hope you can agree that these are aesthetic differences.
Both movements advocate for one ethnicity having the right to live on a particular part of the land, ime. ethonationalism (Nazis: "Blood and soil" vs. Zios: "The chosen people who god promised the land to"), both movements are expansionist (N: "Lebensraum" vs. Z: "Buffer zones" and "Greater Israel"), both movements subjugate another ethnicity that they deem lesser and evil (N: Jews, Black people, Roma, vs. Z: Palestinians, Arabs).
Both movements have commited genocide against the other ethnicities.
So, are Nazis pigs? If they are, then the label fits Zionists as well.
Arabs make up 20% of the population of Israel. You people always lie about Israel. Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah want to destroy Israel in the name of Islam so only Muslims can live on the land. You people always ignore that.
20% is an interesting number, though. The percentage of Palestinians who were Arabs in 1918 was around 90%. I wonder if that might have something to do with why the Arabs are upset?
Oh right, Israel _has_ destroyed nearly all the entire Arab society that lived in Palestine. As opposed to your claim that "Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah _want_ to destroy Israel in the name of Islam".
You think a hypothetical backlash to an ethnic cleansing is worse than the ethnic cleansing itself?
It seems you're the one who seems to be ignoring the factual crimes against humanity that Israel commits, and only care about imagined ones that Israel would be victim to.
Israel left Gaza in 2005.stop telling obvious lies. Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7 2023 killing at least 800 civilians in an act of incredibly bloodthirsty barbarism, including children, the elderly, and 364 victims attending the Nova music festival. Remember when Hamas paraded the body of that young German woman Shani Louk they killed like a hunting trophy?
You're absolutely right, and this is antisemitic propaganda. Israel left more than 20 years ago and didn't return until 2023 due to Hamas terrorism.
They certainly didn't return:
- for five months in 2006 for Operation Summer Rains
- or again in 2006 for Operation Autumn Clouds
- or again in 2008 for Operation Hot Winter
- or again in 2008 into 2009 for Operation Cast Lead
- or again in 2012 for Operation Pillar of Defense
- or again in 2014 for Operation Protective Edge
- or again in 2018 and 2019 for incursions and special-forces actions, like that covert IDF operation in Khan Younis that got fucked up and led to a firefight deep in Gaza (but that couldn't have happened, because they left back in 2005, right?)
- or lastly, before October 7, in 2021 in Operation Guardians of the Walls.
None of those large named operations could have happened, let alone anything smaller than named operations, like special forces or commando raids, because those things are purely Hamas propaganda, and not formal IDF operations.
This is what makes talking about Israel so exhausting. Everyone of those operations was a repsponse to some violence Hamas did and you just ignore it because you are so incredibly biased.
Hamas thinks it can destroy Israel with force. It can't anymore than native Americans can destroy the US. And Hamas trying and failing over and over and over and over has made the lives of Palastinians much worse. Hamas gleefully kills any Palestinians that point this out or oppose them in any way.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
> Everyone of those operations was a repsponse to some violence Hamas did and you just ignore it because you are so incredibly biased.
You're right. It -is- exhausting. Because I never said a word about the merit, or lack thereof, of Israel's actions or reactions, or Hamas'.
I just commented that Israel has spent multiple years in Gaza "since they left".
HOWEVER, you absolutely stated, and get bent out of shape multiple times in this thread alone, at anyone even hinting Israel set foot in Gaza since 2005:
Someone comments saying this exact thing, "Israel has been operating in buffer zones", etc., etc. and you?
"Israel left... Stop telling obvious lies."
Also, it might not be permanent occupation but when you're back there nearly every year for 3-9 months, it might not feel like you ever really left.
here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
Yes, this is the important thing to know. I've heard way too many conversations that go back and forth about every act of vengeance in either direction after this, it's all noise. Partition plan started this. But I wouldn't call it an easy way out of responsibility; UK's leaders took a clear and binding position in favor of Zionism.
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. It's more about the broad political alignment than the specific meaning of the word.
Zionist does have a specific meaning. It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land, and that other creeds and ethnicities should be second class within the Jewish state in Palestine.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
"It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land"
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
Ok, well, you seem to be a Zionist. And not very educated on the matter (or willfully misrepresenting things).
The Palestinians are the people who lived there. The Zionists expelled half of them and razed 500 villages to the ground in 1948. It was an ethnic cleansing. They denied them the right to return.
There was a Palestinian identity and there was a Palestinian society. They revolted against the Ottomans, and the British promised them sovereignty. The British betrayed them and caved to the Zionists, and the rest is settler colonialism and apartheid.
> And not very educated on the matter (or willfully misrepresenting things).
Right, like stomping around the comments claiming that anything less than pretending Israel didn't set foot in Gaza between 2025 and October 7, 2023 is filthy Hamas propaganda, the existence of at least six formally named IDF operations being just a pesky bit of reality that can be easily run over by a Merkava Mk V main battle tank.
IDF actions in response to Hamas attacks are not the same as permanent occupation of Gaza. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas has been in power ever since and has gleefully killed any Palestinians opposing them.
I'm not a zionist I think the Palastinians were fools to refuse the UN offer of their own country and attack Israel. If they had won they would have expelled all Jews. They could have had their own sovereign Nation for 78 years now.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
You're not a Zionist, but you then proceed to make a Zionist argument?
The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came. That included Jews and Christians, because Palestinians are not a homogeneous group.
The Zionist settlers are not indigenous, they had no right to settle there. They also took the UN resolution and just started a war where they razed 500 villages. I'm sure if the Palestinian side had won, they would have expelled the settlers. But that is only natural. And beside the point, because the Palestinians didn't start the war, and of course uou expel invaders.
"The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came"
And native americans were living in Canada, US, and Mexico before settlers came. The Palestinians are hardly unique in losing land in a war. In fact this is basically the norm in human history. What is almost unique is how Palestinians have made their lives much much worse pathetically trying to get the land back when they have absolutely no chance of doing so, anymore than Native Americans do.
The jews living in Israel in 2026 are indigenous in the sense they are NOT leaving so any scenario where they do is a stupid fantasy. the Palestinians DID start the war, they rejected their own sovereign state in favor of gambling for everything and lost. But they have spent 78 years just refusing to accept reality while Israel has grown rich and powerful.
Arabs stared the war when they rejected the UN offer of a sovereign internationally recognized Palastinian state and tried to destroy Israel instead. They lost. In retrospect this was very stupid.
It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.
Jews legally migrated to the area and bought land starting 1882 driven by the rise of the Zionist movement and pogroms in Eastern Europe. If the Arabs had won the war they would have forced every last Jew out of the area and Israel would never have existed. When the Jordanian Arab Legion took control of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the ancient synagogues were destroyed, and the entire Jewish population was expelled or taken prisoner. The same happened in the Gush Etzion bloc. If the combined Arab armies had won the war, the Jewish state would have been dismantled, and the Jewish population would have been expelled or killed.They lost but have rather pathetically refused to accept this for 78 years now.
That's not true, it's not a majority. It is true that Mizrahi are ~40-45% of Jews in the country, but all Mizrahim are not all indigenous to Palestine. I was referring to the subset of Mizrahi who are Palestinian.
What do you mean by “Palestinian”? They’re Palestinian by the classic definition of “those who live in the region of Palestine”.
If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.
If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.
Illogical collectivist blather suggesting that therefore, Muslims should be treated as a collective, and deprived of rights in Israel?
Also, what’s with the “happily”?
Common term for about 75% of democrats under 50, who must be Jew-haters, of course.
Sorry, ethnonationalism just isn’t a popular ideology, and the word is, in practice, just a shorthand for an instance of that. You’ve lapped up hasbarist propaganda to such an extent that it’s started to be reality.
The left? The left is against Israeli violence. The far right hates Jews.
Let's compare figures like, say Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker.
Fuentes regularly spouts vile anti-semitic rhetoric, painting up a picture of Jews as greedy schemers.
Piker always makes it clear he is talking about Israel, not Jews. Painfully so.
I have not seen a single self-odentified leftist say anything anti-semitic IRL. But I have seen right-wingers do this.
And this same story is reflected in politicians statements as well. The right is anti-semitic.
The ADL claims that the left is, but that is because the ADL wants to conflate Israel with the entire ethnic group of Jews. Which is an obvious and silly bad faith trick. You're also doing the same thing.
That is just a blatant lie?
There are Jews living in all those places. Not that many perhaps, but they exist.
And it's not really about religion. It's about Palestinians specifically, who are indigenous to Palestine, and are under Israeli apartheid.
The Palestinians who have been exiled by Israel, and their children, cannot live where their grandparents lived (even though they should have a right to return, under UN resolutions that Israel has accepted), but any Jew from, let's say Brooklyn, does.
Also, Islam is the only faith in Israel which is not allowed to self-organize. It is singled out among all religious communities as the only one who is not given this right. Which is of course incredibly discriminatory.
There are a lot less Jews living in Muslim countries after Israel was created than before. 800,000 were expelled and mostly moved to Israel. You don't hear them whining for the right to return.
There isn't a single jew living in Gaza. Why is that?
It is very much about religion. Hamas is an explicitly Islamic supremacist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.
What do you mean there isn't a single jew living in Gaza? How is that relevant? That is entirely beside the point.
If you had the option to live as a full citizen in Israel, being told you're part of the dominant ethnicity that's treated as human beings; or staying in Gaza, where you are being bombed to death by the IDF, I wonder which you would choose?
Your argument is essentially stating the conditions of apartheid as negative for dominant ethnic group. I didn't know someone could be so divorced from reality.
Claude may have just bombed an elementary school, meanwhile Dario is whining that Altman and Trump, two well-known psychos, didn’t play fair for a military deal. Anthropic is the last bastion of the sanctimonious neolib and hopefully this war marks the end of that failing ideology.
Anthropic did the deal with Palantir and was begging the government to use their technology to “fight authoritarianism”, are you insinuating that they shouldn’t be held morally accountable for these business decisions?
Your moral outrage is misplaced and is clueless in the face of reality.
Blame Palantir if you want to vent; Dario is literally putting Anthropic's future at risk by not kowtowing to DoW. Also, when Anthropic and Palantir finalized their partnership in 2024, many Anthropic employees raised concerns, which the company addressed by holding AMA meetings.
Anthropic and Google (to a certain extent) are far better when it comes to principles in AI-usage in the context of "Realpolitik" than OpenAI and xAI, both of whom have zero scruples as is personified by their CEOs.
It’s possible for other business leaders to be more evil than you and to still be on the wrong side of history. I’m not even saying Dario is ill-intentioned — just too propagandized to fully comprehend the moral implication of doing deals with war profiteers and throwing in with the U.S. empire.
Anthropic is selling a model and not applications using that model. The latter is not in their hands but they have drawn two specific red lines over which they are willing to go against the mighty DoW.
If you think that no AI model should be allowed to be used by the Military, then you are living in a clueless la-la land. There are perfectly justified Military/Law-Enforcement uses of AI. What we can demand are controls/oversight by a Human over its usage in a lawful manner. Anthropic has done its part by drawing two red lines and cannot be expected to do more.
It is companies like Palantir who build applications for warfare using Anthropic's (and others) models, enabling features like "shortening the kill chain", "enabling decision compression" etc. who need major oversight.
Having played around with this a bit, I recommend using https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery as the CAD language instead. I'm pretty sure it could even transpile to OnShape / Solidworks models as well, though it might require some funky hacks with their extensions frameworks
The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you will about authoritarianism, but China’s non-imperialist foreign policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-industrial complex.
All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the name of “democracy” as it fails to gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and Dario’s rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.
Look. I think the Chinese AI companies are doing a lot of good. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're relatively advanced. I don't think the entire nation of China is a bunch of villains. I don't think the US, even before the current era, is a bunch of do-gooders.
But China has some of the most imperialist policies in the world. They are just as imperialist as Russia or America. Military contracts are still massive business.
I also believe the petrodollar will fall, but it isn't going to be because China built exponentially more solar panels.
That's different to the expansionist imperial policies of Spain in the 1500s or Britain in the 1700s. It also affects a very large proportion of the world's population. That Wikipedia page has some good links for further reading about this.
But it's an important point when considering China's place in the world.
We're talking about the modern world, though. China's imperialism over the past half century is not significantly different from any other major world power. The choices we have aren't 1500s Spain or 1700s Britain vs. 2000s China.
And Belt and Road is the Marshall plan writ large, and it was considered to be one of the largest imperialist plans ever by the USA, and B&R covers many many countries outside of that map. You'll notice all of these loans they've offered have very favorable terms for them - it's arguably many times more exploitative than the Marshall plan.
> Educate me please with a comparison of what China has done to be "some of the most imperialist policies"?
Tibet occupation. Taiwan encirclement and ongoing military exercises. Strong-arming African and Asian countries that made the mistake of signing up for belt & road. Tianenmen Square. Illegal Foreign Police Stations. Uyghurs/Xinjiang genocide and concentration camps. Repeated invasion and occupation of Indian territory in North East and North West. The Great Firewall of China - occupation and suppression of its own populations. Ongoing Han settlement of Tibet, Xinjiang and other ethnic regions. Violent destruction of Hong Kong democracy (that was condition of handover). Spratly Islands occupation. Attacks on Filipino shipping and coast guard. Ongoing attacks on Japan's Senkaku Islands.
Tibet
Hong Kong / Macau
Taiwan
Everything constantly in the South China Sea
Belt and Roads is effectively the Marshall Plan but even bigger - Africa being the major example, but also Eastern Europe, parts of the middle east, etc. Over 100 countries. This exact playbook is what sets up the infrastructure and reasons for military intervention at a later date - protecting your investments.
For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South China Sea alone?
Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?
Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.
First off, I consider the post-Mao / starting with Deng era of Chinese government to be the most relevant when considering who they “are” as a country now.
However, I’d still maintain that before that, China’s foreign policy was more focused on maintaining territorial sovereignty against the threat of Western imperialism vs. focused on expansion or foreign influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_foreign_relations_o...
Meanwhile, the entire territory of the U.S. is predicated on one of history’s largest genocides, and a consistently expansionary foreign policy on top of that.
Tibet, the Philippines, and Taiwan would like to have a word, not to mention Chinese military action in support of its North Korea puppet state, and wars with Vietnam and India.
Are you serious? Don't you know how many wars did China wage? It tried to assimilate Vietnam for 1000 years. The last large scale war against Vietnam was just 1979. In fact, China had started war with all its neighbors, with no exception.
The one we live in, where they have control over a wide swathe of land mass through imperialism and have actively resisted relinquishing it?
The one we live in, where they are constantly surpassing international law in international waters in the South China Sea?
The one we live in, where they are constantly rattling sabers at South Korea and Japan when it comes to military expansion?
The one we live in, where they brutally cracked down on Hong Kong when they did not abide by the 50 year one country two systems deal, not even making it half of the way through the agreed period?
The one we live in, where there is constant threat to Taiwan?
It may have been a lazy post you're responding to, but anyone that is paying attention to this topic enough to talk about it is going to either say 'Of course China is imperialist, the same as every other global power' or take some sort of tankie approach to justify it.
I'm well informed on all of these but no, if we compare to other global power like US or Russia, or historically British, France, Spain, etc, China is 100% not an imperialist or colonialist, not by a large margin. Those issues are largely exaggerated by media and anyone had a decent exposure to history and international politics wouldn't say they are the same.
Sure China has some disputes with neighboring country in South China Sea, the worst conflict they had is fishing boats running into each other. 0 death toll last time I checked.
Meanwhile US killed at least 126 people with alleged drug strike in the Caribbean Sea since last year, WITHOUT trial.
Anyone believing these're equivalent imperialism activity is hypocrite at best.
What China is doing in the South China Sea? The South China Sea.
Let's just compare to the Monroe Doctrine [1]. What this actually means has gone through several iterations by since I think Teddy Roosevelt's time, it's that the United States views the Americas (being North and South America) to be the sole domain of the United States.
This was a convenient excuse for any number of regime changes in Central and South America since 1945. The US almost started World War Three over Cuba in 1962 after the USSR retaliated to the US putting nuclear MRBMs in Turkey. We've starved Cuba for 60+ years for having the audacity to overthrow our puppet government and nationalize some mob casinos. Recently, we kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela because reasons.
But sure, let's focus on China militarizing its territorial waters.
You're arguing that because of the English language name of it is the South China Sea that China owns it and their actions can't be imperialist?
Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam will all be happy to know that we've solved it - we can just abandon it all to China. Problem solved!
This is a silly argument. There are significant territorial disputes that China is extremely aggressive on, international tribunals have ruled them as violating international law in international waters and in sovereign waters of other nations, etc.
And the US just casually carried out a special military operation in another sovereign country and captured their president without consequences. So much for self-righteous.
Obviously self defense with nobel peace price worthy restraint.
Considering it's PRC claimed territory. Literally 100% of PRC claims are inherited from ROC, i.e. PRC has expanded no claims, and actively settled 12/14 land borders (most on earth) essentially all with 50%+ concessions, i.e. PRC ceded more land in negotiations. That OBJECTIVELY, makes PRC the most benevolent rising power in recorded history. Any gov losing land to so many border settlements is committing treason. Also note PCA ruling is not international law, so what PRC does in SCS is not even legally wrong (as in they legally can't be wrong since UNCLOS cannot rule on sovereignty). Or that PRC was last to militarize SCS islands (except Brunai who is good boi), and PRC conceded ROC/TW's original 11dash to 9dash, which even in SCS disputes makes PRC the only party to have made concessions.
PRC is objectively the LEAST imperialistic rising power, by actual non retarded definitions, i.e. expanding on territories outside it's claims, that PRC didn't even make, but again inherited from ROC when UN recognition changed.
“One country two systems” is definitionally not imperialism, and given that “One China” is still an internationally recognized thing, neither is Taiwan. “Imperialism” is not a synonym for “morally repugnant government policy”.
I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree, really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of definitions, perhaps it isn't.
But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh, sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and having their own democratic form of government overthrown and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know what to say.
I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same playbook the US has run out in developing nations for years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the US has done in other places.
But let's look at what the original poster was actually talking about - saying that China is safe because they don't have a military industrial complex because they're not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to get down to the semantics of it all, would be expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd largest military industrial complex in the world, and the gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap disappears immediately.
I think the part about China is just about projecting alignment with the USG in hopes that this will result in Anthropic being treated more favourably by the current administration.
Taiwan is a matter of perspective. From the Chinese perspective, there was a civil war and the KMT lost. That's also the official position of the US, the EU and most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. And China seems happy to maintain the status quo and leave the situation unresolved. Is it really imperialism to say that ultimately there will be reunification?
Even if you accept Tibet as imperialist, which is debatable, it was in 1950. You want to compare that to US imperialism, particularly since WW2 [1]? And I say "debatable" here because Tibet had a system that is charitably called "serfdom" where 90% of people couldn't own land but they did have some rights. However, they were the property of their lords and could be gifted or traded, you know, like property. There's another word for that: slavery.
It is 100% factually accurate to say that the People's Republica of China is not imperialist.
This is the China that is not only threatening to invade Taiwan but doing live fire exercises around the island and threatening and attempting to coerce Japan for suggesting saying it will go to its defense.
It wasn't that long ago that Taiwan claimed to be the legitimate government of China; given that China still maintains the reverse claim, it's not outrageous that it would consider an outside country's defense to be interference in an internal matter.
Whether or not that claim is legitimate, it is consistent with the concept of china having a non-imperialist foreign policy, and claims regarding that need to look elsewhere for supporting evidence.
While that rhetoric makes sense in the context of the history and politics of China and Taiwan, they have been independently governed nations for quite a while and have very different political systems, their own armies, etc. They are de-facto separate nations if nothing else.
I also note China's aggressive and violent colonization and expansive claims of the South China Sea.
Taking any nation/land/sea by force is imperialist, by definition.
taiwan saying otherwise would immediately trigger an attack from the PRC.
its still imperialism that china is dominating a neighbor to require it ro state a certain position, especially when its very far from the defacto reality on the ground, that taiwan is clearly separate
You know who else considers Taiwan to be part of the People's Republic of China? The US, the EU and in fact most countries in the world. It's called the One China policy. There are I believe 12 countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
The position of the PRC is that Taiwan will ultimately be reunified. That doesn't necessarily mean by military force. It doesn't even necessarily mean soon. The PRC famously takes a very long term view.
And those islands you mention are in the South China Sea.
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
The short-term effect is a harbinger of the long-term risk, since capitalism doesn’t inherently care for people who don’t provide economic value. Once superintelligent AI arises, none of us will have value within this system. Even the largest current capital holders will have a hard time holding on to it with an enormous intelligence disadvantage. The logical endpoint is the subjugation or elimination of our species, unless we find a new economic system with human value at its core.
There are a lot of assumptions going on here. One of them is that superintelligent AI will arise. We have no reason to believe this will happen in our lifetimes. I posit that we are about as close to superintelligent AI as James Watt was to nuclear fusion.
The other assumption is that wealth and power are distributed according to intelligence. This is obviously false, wealth and power are largely distributed according to who you or your father plays golf with. As long as AIs don't play golf and don't have fathers, we are quite safe.
> There are a lot of assumptions going on here. One of them is that superintelligent AI will arise. We have no reason to believe this will happen in our lifetimes. I posit that we are about as close to superintelligent AI as James Watt was to nuclear fusion.
This is a perfectly reasonable response if nobody is trying to build it.
Given people are trying to build it, what's the expected value from ignoring the problem? E($Damage_i) = P(BadOutcome_i) * $Damage_i.
$Damage can be huge (there are many possible bad outcomes of varying severity and probability, hence the subscript), which means that at the very least we should try to get a good estimate for P(…) so we know which problems are most important. In addition to it being bad to ignore real problems, it is also bad to do a Pascal's Mugging on ourselves just because we accidentally slipped a few decimal points in our initial best-guess, especially as we have finite capacity ourselves to solve problems.
Finally, let's assume you're right, that we're centuries off at least, and that all the superintelligent narrow that AI we've already got some examples of involve things that can't be replicated in any areas that pose any threat. How long would it take to solve alignment? Is that also centuries off? We've been trying to align each other since laws were written like 𒌷𒅗𒄀𒈾 at least, and the only reason I'm not giving an even older example is that this is the oldest known written form to have survived, not that we weren't doing it before then.
> The other assumption is that wealth and power are distributed according to intelligence. This is obviously false, wealth and power are largely distributed according to who you or your father plays golf with. As long as AIs don't play golf and don't have fathers, we are quite safe.
Nepotism helps, but… huh, TIL that nobody knows who was the grandfather of one of the world's most famous dictators.
Cronyism is a viable alternative for a lot of power-seekers.
So I propose the Musk supremacy criterion to be the following.
Suppose that a wealthy and powerful human (such as Elon Musk) were to suddenly obtain the exact same sinister goals as the hypothetical superintelligent AI in question. Suppose further that this human was able to convince/coerce/bribe another N (say 1000) humans to follow his bidding.
A BadOutcome is said to be MuskSupreme if it could be accomplished by the superintelligent AI, but not by the suddenly-evil Musk and his accomplices.
Obviously[citation needed] it is only the MuskSupreme BadOutcomes we care about. Do there exist any?
For example 1000 people — but only if you get to choose who — is sufficient to take absolute control of both the US congress and the Russian State Duma (or a supermajority of those two plus the Russian Federation Council), which gives them the freedom to pass arbitrary constitutional amendments… so your scenario includes "gets crowned King of the USA and Russia, 90% of the global nuclear arsenal is now their personal property" as something we don't care about.
> As long as AIs don't play golf and don't have fathers, we are quite safe.
Until it becomes 'who you exchange bytes most efficiently with" and all humans are at a disadvantage against a swarm of even bellow average intelligence AGI agents.
Because, as unlikely as it is, if we're discussing risk scenarios for AI getting out of hand. Well then a monolithic superintelligence is just one of the possibilities. What about a swarm of dumb AIs that are nonetheless capable of reasoning and decision making and they become a threat?
That's pretty much what we did. There's no super intelligent monkey in charge. As much as some have tried to pretend, material or otherwise. There's just billions of average intelligence monkeys and we overran all Earth's ecosystems in a matter of centuries. Which is neither trivial nor fully explained yet.
The difference is that we have 100% complete control of these AIs. We can just go into the power grid substation next to the data center and throw the big breaker, and the AI ceases to exist.
When humans developed, we did not displace an external entity that had created us and that had complete power to kill us all in an instant.
Look at the measures that were implemented during covid. Many of them were a lot more extreme than shutting down datacentres, yet they were aimed to mitigate a risk far less than "existential".
That data is in fact orthogonal to my point, for two reasons:
1. When we are talking about wealth and power that actually can influence the quality of the lives of many other people, we are talking about way less than 0.01% of the population. Those people aren't covered in this survey, and even if they were it would be impossible to identify on an axis spanning 0-100%.
2. Your linked article talks about income. People with significant wealth and power frequently have ordinary or below-ordinary income, for tax reasons.
Actually, it will have the opposite effect, at least in the short term.
People who own high value assets (everything from land to the AI) will continue to own them and there will be no opportunities for people to earn their way up (because they can be replaced by AI).
"The logical endpoint is the subjugation or elimination of our species"
Possibly, but it would be by our species (those who own and control the AI) rather than by the AI.
I would venture to say that transhumanism will be the path and goal of the capital class, as that will be a tangible advantage potentially within their grasp.
I suppose then that they would become “homo sapiens sapiens sapiens” or some other similarly hubris laden label, and go on to abandon, dominate or subjugate the filthy hordes of mere Homo sapiens sapiens.
As Antonio Gramsci said: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
The forces of blind or cynical techno-optimism accelerating capitalism may feel insurmountable, but the future is not set in stone. Every day around the world, people in seemingly hopeless circumstances nevertheless devote their lives to fighting for what they believe in, and sometimes enough people do this over years or even decades that there’s a rupture in oppressive systems and humanity is forever changed for the better. We can only strive to live by our most deeply held values, within the circumstances we were placed, so that when we look back at the end of our lives we can take comfort in the fact that we did the best we could, and just maybe this will be enough to avert the inevitable.
> The expert believes that “asking for regulations because of fear of superhuman intelligence is like asking for regulation of transatlantic flights at near the speed of sound in 1925.”
This assessment of the timeline is quite telling. If supersonic flight posed an existential threat to humanity, we certainly should have been thinking about how to mitigate it in 1925.
1925 of course would have been a great time to put limits on fossil fuel use in aviation along with the rest of the fossil fuel applications to manage the biggest current threat to human civilization. (Arrhenius did the science showing global warming in 1896 or so)
Given the dual use of fossil fuels between military and civilian purposes, I wonder whether any state that deliberately handicapped car/aero/petrochemicals would’ve been able to survive the early twentieth century.
Both the USA and Nazi Germany benefited massively from have a civilian industrial base that was complementary to military production.
Of course you could also argue that Germany wouldn't have had the early successes in war, (if they had even started it). Or at a third juncture, would have fared worse against USSR.
There's a book called Freedom's Forge that I'm a fan of, it makes the argument that the Auto Industry (And assembly lines, mechanization in general) were the single most important reason the Allies won WWII. In fact all the big auto manufacturers of the time retooled their assembly lines to build tanks and airplanes. It's conceivable that if we never mass produced cars, the US wouldn't have had the capability to win the war.
Would you shut down the powerhouse of our economy -- travel, transportation, energy -- for something hypothetical that hasn't even happened and doesn't appear to be close to happening?
I'm pro-clean energy, but you can't do without fossil fuels. Not if you want society to keep climbing up and up and up.
A thing does not require intent or consciousness to be dangerous. How many chemists have blown themselves up because they didn't realize an experiment was dangerous? How many production systems have crashed because the developer didn't accurately predict what the code they wrote will do?
Alkali metals and C++ code do not require ill intent, but they will still obliterate your limbs / revenue if you build and use them wrong.
One of my more tangible hypotheses is a sort of runaway effect. Economic, geopolitical, and military competitive pressures will quickly push out anyone and anything that still relies on last era human-in-the-loop processes, the same way any organization that doesn't utilize artificial lighting, electricity, and instant communication will obviously be left far behind. You have to just trust that the machine running stock market transactions will do its math right.
But unlike transaction software failure modes, which quickly result in outright crashes or verifiably incorrect errors, failure modes of non-bayesian decision making software probably looks something like what happens when existing economic, geopolitical, and military decision-makers make decisions that are harmful, unethical, or otherwise undesirable for humanity. This time augmented with, if not superhuman intelligence, at least superhuman speed and superhuman knowledge breadth.
Love that observation on C++. That's the reason I love C++. It's a language for those who need, nay crave, absolute raw performance. No training wheels. Short of assembly, it's just as close to the machine as you can get.
Sure. I use Java, Python and Javascript all the time. But when I need the performance, for demanding VR/ graphics, nothing comes close to combination of speed and expressive power of abstraction of C++.
Oh yeah, it will replicate after the computer is shut down and then reinstalled from scratch. Especially when it's much simpler than that i.e. the whole thing lives in a throwaway container.
> I really can't grasp how people think that a system that doesn't have a need to preserve itself will somehow start thinking for itself.
Society exists because cooperation outperforms the alternatives. If you have human level AI at some point there is no benefit to cooperation and a major incentive to prevent anyone else gaining access to equal/better AI.
AI itself does not need to have any motivation - people in charge have plenty of incentives to eliminate the rest once they don't need them anymore.
What makes you think they're predicting the apocalypse correctly, then?
Another thing the technical geniuses tend to be good at is exploiting the power they suddenly obtain in their own interest, either directly or with regulations and collusion with those who hold actual hard power.
Evil AI owners seem to be much closer and far more material than an evil AI, and coincidentally it's something that is almost entirely lacking from the discourse, as public attention is too focused on sci-fi hypotheticals.
The bar is different - saying "there is no risk of apocalypse" requires you to be ~100% certain, because it you're saying "I'm 99% certain that there won't be a an apocalypse" then you're on the side of the AI-risk people, because a low-probability extinction event does justify action; the risk argument isn't that apocalypse is certain but rather that it is sufficiently plausible to take preventive measures.
I am only 99% certain that we won't be invaded by hostile aliens. Therefore we should take measures like building a giant space laser to prevent that apocalypse.
It is somewhat similar, but substantially different - we can make a solid argument that the likelihood of getting invaded by hostile aliens in the nearest century is far lower than 1%, and also if such an invasion does happen, then building a giant space laser won't make any difference at all.
The key difference between powerful alien invaders and us creating a powerful alien entity that we can't control is that the former either will or won't happen due to external circumstances, but the latter is something we would be doing to ourselves and can avoid if we choose to.
Bullshit. You can't presume to quantify the probability of either event. You're just making things up. All of the arguments are built on a foundation of sand. This stuff falls in the realm of religion and philosophy, not hard science and math.
The issue is that the doomsday scenario is extremely vague. The actual mechanism of action of a hypothetical rogue AGI is usually handwaved away as "it will be self-improving, superhumanly persuasive, and far smarter than us, so it will somehow figure out how to do something, or convince us to do it". What exactly will happen? How exactly will it happen? Will the world do nothing until that moment? How do society, politics, military fit into that scenario? All that rationalist navel gazing I've seen so far is either hilariously unaware of the existence of the outside world or assumes it won't change in the process.
You can't fight what you can't even see, let alone not sure if it exists at all. You don't invent a pair of wings because 1900s' you thinks that "the scientists will invent an anti-aging cure in the next decade, and surely personal flight will be ubiquitous in 2000's". You don't design a plasma gun for your Mars landing just in case you land in a city between Martian canals and see an army of little green men there. The world doesn't work like that, by the time you reach the Mars surface the context will be wildly different. You get burned and put guardrails, maybe. Not the other way around. Nobody can see through higher order effects, no matter how smart they are. And as the threat becomes progressively more clear there will be more caution, if needed. Premature optimization yada yada.
What actually happens right now is everybody and my aunt seriously discussing the evil robots that will come and kill us. That's pure mass hysteria, caused by the scaremongering and the cult-like beliefs of very smart people with disproportional influence who can't contain their own conjectures and bullshit in the realm of science fiction.
On the other hand,the end goal of OpenAI is the major job replacement, according to their current charter. [1] "Broadly distributed"... will they distribute their utopia to North Korea? Not happening, isn't it? I think it's obvious that if the actual job replacement rate will ever get anywhere close to the levels of late 19th early 20th century industrialization, this will produce major societal shifts and struggles, wealth and power redistribution, and a lot of blood and wars. Because the dependence on your job is the only ephemeral influence you (as a worker) have on this world. And of course, the companies that control the AI will be gatekeepers, and they will be more than happy to close the open research and open source models, and pull the regulation ladder and lie in bed with politicians and military, like OpenAI already does for years, of course they realize that and their utopical self-contradicting "charter" is nothing more than marketing hogwash that they already changed and will change in the future.
This is far more realistic and will happen much earlier than the rogue AI science fiction, if happens at all. In fact it's slowly happening now, and it's not talked about nearly enough, because the attention is mostly misdirected onto the vague superhuman AI red herring.
The actual mechanism of action is handwaved away because there are many options, we don't expect to ever have an exhaustive list and specifics of those are largely irrelevant with respect to preventing them, so IMHO it's not worth spending time and effort analyzing specific scenarios as long as we assume that there exists at least one plausible (even if unlikely) scenario. A hypothetical specific scenario of a rogue AI engineering and launching a deadly supervirus is effectively equivalent to a specific scenario resulting in a world consumed by 'grey goo' nanobots - you don't (can't) fix the former by implementing some resilience or detection for diseases, you don't (can't) fix the latter by doing extra research on nanorobotics, you approach both (and any others) by tackling the core issues of, for example, ensuring that you can control what goals artificial agents have even if they are self-modifying in some aspects.
Like, "What exactly will happen? How exactly will it happen?" is worth discussing if and only if one party seriously believes they can convince the other that none of the imaginable scenarios are even remotely plausible; and if we assume that there is at least one scenario where we can say "I'm 99% certain it won't happen and 1% it could" then that discussion is pretty much over, the existential risk is plausible (and the consequences of that are so much incomparably larger than e.g. major job displacement that it justifies attention even if it's many orders of magnitude less likely) and we should instead talk about how to prevent it.
I'm not making the argument that the existence of stronger-than-human general AI will result in a catastrophe, but I am asserting that the mere existence of a stronger-than-human general AI (without some controls we currently can't figure out how to make or even if they are possible) carries at least some plausible chance of existential risk - for the sake or argument, let's say at least 1%; and I am asserting that a 1% of existential risk is a totally absolutely unacceptably high risk that must not be allowed to happen, because it is far more important[1] than e.g 100% certainty of major job displacement and social unrest.
"Will the world do nothing until that moment?" I think that what we saw from the global reaction to things like start of Covid-19 or climate change is completely sufficient to assume that we can't rely on the world stopping a major-but-stoppable issue in a timely manner, so "surely the world will do something" is not a sufficiently convincing argument to discount the risk; I don't think you can plausibly deny that even for a clearly catastrophic problem there is at least a 10% chance that the world could still delay sufficient action until it's too late; and this means that it doesn't really matter what the exact likelihood of that is based on society, politics, military aspects, we should work with the assumption that the world actually might do nothing to prevent any specific scenario from unfolding, and we should de-risk it in other ways.
[1] Looking at other posts, perhaps this is where we'd disagree, and in that case it's probably the core of the discussion which also doesn't really depend on any details of specific scenarios.
If you read what Yann writes you'll pretty quickly see that he's rather ignorant about AI. His opinion is probably worse on average than the typical technical generalist's
That’s hilarious. I have read a few things he has written which suggests he’s definitely better than the average technical generalist. I haven’t read everything obviously but he has written quite a lot https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WLN3QrAAAAAJ
You're missing the point and context. Person above me says this analysis is quite telling, then points out the counterfactual historical hypothetical, which makes no sense. Yann thinks supersonic flight is not worthy of precautionary principle ethics in 1925? I'm saying the same thing--Yann's terrible, nonsense analogy is indeed poorly argued, but plausibly would make sense as a Freudian slip inconsistency of some sort. Ergo, "it is quite telling". As to what contents in his mind, or his motivations, I don't care to speculate.
The fact that you make insinuations about what I think is pretty aggressive and terrible similarly, this forum ought to have better manners than that when writing replies to complete strangers. Not everyone who has a different opinion is some crypto conspiracy theorist, and you are wrong to jump to such a suggestion.
> I guess things like recursive self-improvement. You wouldn’t want to let your little AI go off and update its own code without you having oversight. Maybe that should even be a licensed activity—you know, just like for handling anthrax or nuclear materials.
He’s clearly aware of the risks of runaway, self-improving AI, and the idea that we can prevent this with regulation is laughable. The car is barreling towards the edge of the cliff, and many of our best and brightest have decided to just put a blindfold on and keep flooring it.
