remarkEon

Except I haven't devolved from anything. It's entirely consistent, and the whole chain confirms that it isn't possible to coherently debate this with people whose starting position is insane, like yours. At it is insane to assert that "trivially every other country has a better rack record" than the US does, and it is insane to claim that the US was founded with the express intention of killing off the indigenous inhabitants of North America. These are insane positions to hold, and yet ... here you are.

Amazing. I do not owe a foreigner a debate or explanation on how their contrived and ridiculous claim about the origin of my country is wrong. You start off by violating the very same rule that you now claim that I am violating, and then get upset that I respond in kind. 10/10, no notes.

>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.

This is your original comment. "Predicated" means "to establish". So, your claim is the United States was founded "to ethnically cleanse the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide". Can you find some primary sources, from George Washington perhaps, where he says "we are founding this country to kill the natives". Please be specific. Is English not your first language?

Again, this is such a common thing. You are the one that introduced this absurd claim, not me. I have not derailed anything, and there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.

No worries. Sufficient encryption, or encryption breaking, technology trends toward behavior as a weapon. As such, the military is highly, highly interested in mathematics generally, and cryptography specifically. There's a ton of really fun and riveting history there, if you're interested. For a long time, "encryption" to a certain degree was export controlled, but that's not really how it works today. The point is, you cannot have effective cyberweapons without extremely sophisticated ... math.

My point is math is a weapon.

Most of the important maths research is funded by the Department of War. NSF is a good chunk, I'd have to look it up, but I wouldn't be concerned about this at all. Math is important for the war planners, always has been always will be.

All true but the kind of alignment problem you're talking about is only possible when the core of a society is directed at inspiring, bold, massive projects. There's not much on offer as an alternative to Muskism. It's worth remembering how insane everyone thought he was for claiming you could land the rocket upright and reuse it. And even more so, that you could catch one with chopsticks.

Yes I already said I understand that you hate the United States. Is your actual point that you want to play some sort of "which country has the highest body count in their history" competition? I'm not distracting (or distracted) from anything, I am fully aware of the kinds of games you and those like you attempt to play.

The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.

Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.

Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".

Okay.

>Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.

The problem here is that you appear to believe there is a factual claim involved, when there isn't. It's like claiming the point of water is to drown people.

Edit, since I noticed you're the author upthread. It's worth pointing out, since you are new here, that your initial comment also violates the spirit of the guidelines.

>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.

Forgetting for a moment if this is true or not, it's not a claim that's falsifiable. It's an ideological statement that is meant to convey that the speaker a) is likely a communist (congratulations), b) has extreme disdain for the United States, and c) attempts to redirect what are meant to be policy discussions into a blackhole of attempting to argue about whether or not the United States is evil. This is pointless, but is a common tactic used by online bullies.

The comparison between Texas and Israel-Palestine is laughable. In the former, American settlers moved to an empty territory at the invitation of the Mexican government on the condition that they obeyed Mexican law, converted to Catholicism, and on the additional condition that they would assist the Mexican government in fighting the Comanche who were raiding settlements across the Mexican interior, all of which the American settlers agreed to. The American settlers eventually outnumbered the Mexican administers of state security (the army and so on), and, again because this was empty territory before the Americans settled it, declared independence and the territory was annexed, Mexico then invaded Texas, and the United States declared war believing they had casus belli, and Mexico lost. The rest is history, though in this case the timeframe here is something like "30 years", I'd have to look up dates of the main events.

On what planet is this at all comparable to Israel-Palestine, a conflict that arguably goes back 1200 years? Just the "settlement" part? Be specific.

>I'm in the set "them". I looked at you, the USA, from the outside more than once, and my decision every time was "you know what? I don't need any of that nonsense". Likewise for many of my peers, at least one of whom resigned from a big tech firm rather than be relocated to the USA.

Then it sounds like you and your peers made a good decision, both for you and for my country. There are already too many people working in elite industries here who do not like the United States, have no loyalty to it, and are blood and soil nationalists for the country they actually care about. It's fine to be honest about that, and I genuinely applaud your self discipline in remaining outside the United States of America (alternatively known as The Aerospace Republic).

All of it. If I thought I wanted to discuss technology with communists I'd join reddit.

>further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine

Genuinely laughed out loud at this. This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so. It's comically at odds with the written record.

>But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2

Oh wow, news to me. Last I checked, we had pretty much the entire planet trying to come here. Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization? Or do you want me to do this.