Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf (cognition.ai)
501 points by alazsengul 8d ago 434 comments
Uv: Running a script with dependencies (docs.astral.sh)
478 points by Bluestein 22h ago 158 comments
The United States withdraws from UNESCO
556 layer8 715 7/22/2025, 2:09:49 PM state.gov ↗
Seems to be a revolving door
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gra%C4%8Danica_Monastery
She only gets reinstated again for the purpose of making another dramatic exit.
There'll never be a reason for them to send a skilled diplomat, so may as well send a shit stirrer who's only good for causing controversy.
In the two decades between 1984 and 2003, UNESCO implemented a number of reforms in management+transparency+politicization, and the U.S. returned.
Then Palestine was admitted, and the U.S. left.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220503183152/https://www.nytim...
As a non-American, doesn't this seem a little ridiculous to some people in the US? This screams of a kind of melodramatic, overdone theatrics that the US doesn't seem to do to anyone else. I get that the US has a lot of Israeli money/investments/customers and extremely religious people, but even then, why is it going this far to enshrine their relations to specific states in their laws? It ends up coming off as the US bowing on their knees to relatively minor nations on the other side of the world.
Iran and North Korea. China with Taiwan. This is deeply precedented geopolitical drama.
> It ends up coming off as the US bowing on their knees to relatively minor nations
If Israel and Palestine are your issue, of course. (Everything will tend to be. This is just how pet causes and the availability heuristic work.) If not, it doesn’t.
The continued existence of these particular laws in 2011 was, in any case, more a convenient excuse to do something they didn't not want to do anyway, than something that couldn't be changed if political will went the other way. It's just a bit stronger of a commitment than the sitting president's whim, which is also a thing that happens.
Perhaps the disconnect is that the US actively engages in foreign policy at all?
I expect the same treatment for Iran and North Korea.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141224180231/https://foreignpo...
There are no real "sides" when it comes to the U.S. and Israel. Every party bends the knee and kisses the wall. It’s one big club, and we’re not in it.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply here, but like it or not, most Americans do support Israel.
https://thecradle.co/articles/us-popular-support-for-israel-...
About 10% of Americans identify as evangelical protestants
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/how-many-evangelicals-...
A lot more Americans support helping Ukraine.
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Gotta love you turning this into a concept similar to "which sports team do you support more". Following your link, the actual question is "In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?". which has a lot different nuance (nuance? Oh wait I forget where I am...)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-a...
> Most American evangelicals support Israel
Most American boomers support Israel.
Outside those demos, the advantage to Israelis is significant enough to drown that partisan youthful signal everywhere but in local primaries where there are large numbers of young Democrats. (Support for Israelis is dropping. But support for Palestinians is lower.)
The dimension that doesn’t get attention is that most Americans don’t care about foreign policy. They may have views. But they won’t vote on them.
Overall, it seems that support is waning. (46% according to Gallup)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657404/less-half-sympathetic-to...
He will deflect because his Bible is the American Evangelicals. So much for separation of state and religion.
This is just not true. Most Americans are actually unaware how much influence Israel and its lobby has over our politicians and are also mostly unaware of what is actually happening over there.
There is a set of evangelical Christians who have misinterpreted a passage in the book of Genesis to mean that blessing the tribe of Israel means sending unlimited weapons to the modern nation state of Israel. But that is not even close to the majority of Americans.
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https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-ameri...
From the article:
It turns out when you invade a country and commit a genocide, you become less popular. Putin figured that out. Hitler figured that out. Netanyahu’s still mulling it over.Well, Israel's been committing a genocide for, conservatively, nearly 60 years, so, yeah, its probably a suprise to them that after that long of not having an adverse effect on US public support, that has changed.
At this point in time, you can make your own determination about how that has worked out.
I know it makes you feel good to imagine a world of enemies, and "every party bends the knee and kiss the wall" is some top notch imagery. But in the real world you have allies in this particular fight, and working against them is in fact doing the opposite of what you claim to want.
Edit: 40+ year-long trend?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44648359
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000012506323&seq=...
Remember when presidents followed the law?
That said, the one area where the Constitution really does give the President a fairly free hand is in foreign policy.
For all the talk about wanting to do things scientifically, there's a remarkable lack of willingness to actually experiment. If a failed experiment is fatal, then we'll never do anything, bad or good.
not to mention that Hamas was supposed already destroyed 6 months ago
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-gaza-war-hunger-childre...
Ragequitting UNESCO over their recognition of palestine is a small part of the project of supporting the ethnic cleansing of gaza and the west bank.
Its not the genocide aspect - there are other genocides that are happening (Myanmar for example) that don't cause this reaction. Don't think its anti antisemitism either, as you don't see a lot of narratives that come with traditional rhetoric of that type.
Whoever is pushing media out on this is must have figured something out in the format to make people this polarized.
Like there were always practical limits to how much the US could constrain Israel, especially due to its relative popularity until recently. A bunch of activists didn’t recognize that and tacitly endorsed letting Trump win and now here we are.
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"KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—Thousands of hungry Palestinians amassed last Tuesday morning outside a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid center here. The moment the gates cracked open, the crowd surged forward.
American security contractors tried to keep control, but scores of men pushed through barricades and snatched boxes of food awaiting distribution. Others sprinted in behind them. Men on speeding motorcycles raced past the pedestrians to grab whatever food they could. Gunshots rang out—it wasn’t clear from where. Within about 15 minutes, all the food was gone."
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/us-israel-gaza-aid-dea...
I know it's easy to judge being far away, but seriously, men on speeding motorcycles?
I don’t see anything obviously suspicious in that - if your family was starving would you sit back and let them die? Or maybe hop on a motorcycle and cut to the front of the queue?
Jesus christ.
[0] Reminds me of someone saying to a rapt audience that people in coastal areas flooded by sea level rise would just "sell their houses and move" (sell their houses to whom, fucking aquaman?).
Why wouldn't they be on "speeding" motorcycles? They have a family to feed. They're probably coming from some distance away. People travel on motorcycles.
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Desperation and survival.
However Sweden was the first country to recognise Palestine.
Is it possible that the pulling out of UNESCO is further in-line with Trumps “we want to focus on America” fluff, similar to the threats of pulling out of NATO and the actual pulling out of the Paris Accords.
I’m aware that there has still been some US interference in the middle-east, I’m just not sure I’m drawing the same connections as you.
Also, and I mean this in the best way I can: I don’t really trust anything coming out of Gaza’s health ministry. That doesn’t mean I side with Israel as they are also distorting facts very often.
The journalists' association of the French wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP) warned on Monday that staff working with the agency in Gaza are at risk of starvation and that "without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die."
In the statement, the SDJ said that AFP's journalists in Gaza have warned that they no longer have strength to report, with one photographer, Bashar Taleb, saying in a post on Facebook: "My body is thin and I can no longer work."
"Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger," the SDJ said in a post on X.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/22/afp-journalists-at-risk-...
Nothing to do with israel destroying farms and crops?
Hamas bad. We can all agree hamas bad. But to blame starvation on hamas when israel is in control of the food supply… how do you mental gymnastics your way to that??
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/afp-fact-check-media-bi...
Are reporters taking food from Gaza’s or, how is that distributed?
Maybe read before commenting, or perhaps allow people to be ignorant and admit that openly; jumping down my throat because I don’t already know your favourite news outlet solves what exactly?
(also don’t think I don’t see the irony of your bio being: “I usually don't know what I'm talking about.”)
If you google for "famine yemen", you see very thin children, with just skin on bone - all the fat and muscle is gone. If you google for "famine gaza", they just seem a lot healthier.
And i’m not sure how your sweden example says anything about the US supporting israel’s genocide? Was there something you expected to happen when sweden recognized palestine?
It is hard/impossible to come up with an accurate death toll.
The Gaza Health Ministry systemically underreports the death toll by only counting bodies that they have directly observed.
Some third parties have tried to extrapolate from the reported numbers to get to the actual numbers; but that is a highly speculative endeavor under the best circumstances.
This was only true in an early phase of the conflict; they've long since been adding casualties reported by "reliable media sources" as well as a Google form.
In short: gazans are all issued ID numbers at birth. The ministry of health has published id numbers of the dead, which means you can do stats and tell if the data is fake. On top of that, so far (afaik since 2009 when hamas came to power) nobody has caught them in a lie. So they’ve a track record of telling the truth, and give us data that we can smell-test for fraud and it passes.
So yes, nobody else is on the ground to produce independent numbers, so the numbers can’t be fully verified. But using that doubt as an excuse for inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is fucking disgusting.
If you comment that they give us this data, surely you have a link to said data?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_...
That would be great (?), except the stated reason for pulling out was "anti-Israel bias". It's about kowtowing to a foreign terror regime, not standing up for America.
Pretty much all atrocities in the middle east can be traced back Europeans (mainly UK) carving up the area after ww1 and theirs and American imperialism since ww2. Israel is a project of this.
But Israel is a "project" that needs to end. More like a scape goat.
I'm israeli. This war is bad, my government is evil. But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.
If you disagree with me, think about it a bit and what it says about you.
Now, I don't know whether that is true. It seems to be the argument that the Israeli government and the right-wing majority of its population are making now - that if they give Palestinians actual freedom, Israel will just cease to be, so they have to starve people to death, bomb them etc. The more they do that, the stronger the argument that Israel should cease to exist.
If there is another option that allows Israel to continue to exist, that's great. But it's really up to Israel to come up with a viable option for that, because Israel is an alien entity that forcefully imposed itself on this territory to begin with.
Regarding Russia, I'm a Russian citizen, and the invasion of Ukraine did, in fact, made me reach the conclusion that Russia should not exist as a state. It's not that this particular war is especially damning; it's that Russia has a very long track record of imperialist wars, and, more importantly, it doesn't change - it keeps doing it. Arguably Russia as it exists today is inevitably imperialistic simply because it's a polity that is cobbled together and still largely held by force or threat of it - it never really fully de-colonized, and if it ever does, it'd be an order of magnitude smaller. So from that perspective it really cannot change - and if so, then yes, it should cease to exist.
But people do suggest russia should give back the territory they’ve taken by force. That’s most (if not all depending on your take) of israel.
Historically - in my opinion in the wake of ww2 a jewish state should have been carved out of germany, rather than england giving away land that wasn’t theirs to give away. So in a sense Germany as we know it should have ceased to exist.
Just as now, i believe for there to be peace in the region israel as we know it must cease to exist. Either by radically changing and becoming a place where palestinians and jews live together in peace and shared governance, or by giving up a huge chunk of land they stole in ‘48 to create two states.
Opinions, obviously.
> This war is bad, my government is evil.
We have a lot in common
> But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.
Absolutely!!!
I did not call for the end of Israel as a project, I do disagree with it's creation, considering how it turned out, especially since it was more or less the intention of Zionism as stated by it's founders.
I don't know how to solve it. But I do know that Israels actions since it was founded has worked against any kind of solution that is not a takeover of the area and the creation of their ethnostate.
Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when they directly state that they're withdrawing over the decision to admit Palestine?
I wish I could remember where I heard it, but someone once pointed out that the only difference between special interests and public interests was who said it. This feels like that.
The modern difference is one comes with prison time.
Recognition of Palestine as a member state; resolutions referring to certain contested sites (e.g., Jerusalem's Old City, Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif) primarily using their Arabic names; promotion of gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as support for comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) programs; emphasis on climate change action, including its designation of World Heritage Sites at risk due to global warming; alignment with the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (specifically SDGs related to gender, education, and environmental goals); and advocacy for internet governance initiatives
Which is to say, that many many states have been founded by terrorists/freedom fighters. That's the norm, not the exception. Like, from the perspective of the British Crown, George Washington was a terrorist.
Anybody that supports this or tries to draw false parallels with genuine liberation movements is disgusting for obvious reasons.
I think you are either ignorant of the history of your country or you are ignoring the parts that don’t fit your narrative.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's widely documented by respectable historians.
"Will fight for your rights until your born and then just completely abandon you" (not the exact phrasing I remember seeing)
The ramblings of the anti-war set...
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The Goals are defined here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
> Target 1.4: By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology, and financial services
> Indicator 1.4.2: Proportion of total adult population with secure tenure rights to land [...] [This goal seems to state that poor people should own just as much land as rich people. That's insane, but even ignoring that, the goal definitely states that renting is evil and everyone needs to own.]
> Target 1.b: Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions
> Target 3.5: Strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol
> Indicator 3.5.1: Alcohol per capita consumption (aged 15 years and older) within a calendar year in litres of pure alcohol [In other words, the UN considers itself to be achieving this goal if people drink less alcohol than they used to. There is no indicator for problems caused by substance abuse.]
> Target 3.7: By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information, and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes
> Target 3.8: Achieve universal health coverage, including [...]
> Target 4.1: By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education [...]
> Target 4.2: By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education
> Target 4.5: By 2030, eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations
> Indicator 4.5.1: Parity indices (female/male, rural/urban, bottom/top wealth quintile and others such as disability status, indigenous peoples and conflict-affected, as data become available) for all education indicators on this list
> Target 4.7: By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development
> Target 4.a: Build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive [...]
> Target 10.3: Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome [...]
> Target 10.4: Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage, and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality
> Target 10.a: [we're still on the goal "reduce inequality"] Implement the principle of special and differential treatment for developing countries [...]
> Target 9.2: Promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and, by 2030, significantly raise industry's share of employment and gross domestic product [If they really mean this, I'll admit that it swings the opposite way from what I would have expected. I have a suspicion that they don't want this to happen in developed countries. The indicators don't disambiguate. Either way it's a divisive cause.]
> Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change
> Target 12.2: By 2030, achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources
> Indicator 12.2.1: Material footprint, material footprint per capita, and material footprint per GDP ["We want people to have less stuff."]
> Indicator 12.2.2: Domestic material consumption, domestic material consumption per capita, and domestic material consumption per GDP ["We want people to have less stuff."]
> Target 14.5: By 2020, conserve at least 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas
> Target 16.b: Promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development
> Indicator 16.b.1: Proportion of population reporting having personally felt discriminated against or harassed in the previous 12 months
I wouldn't call this an ideologically neutral set of goals, no.
Target 16.1 seems fine, though I'm a little surprised they didn't use the "By 2030, end all [...]" phrasing.
What would you call it? I mean, none of it sounds like something you can make a argument that it shouldn't be achieved at all. In fact, I would question the ideology of someone that wouldn't want to achieve those goals.
Really? I'm not sure you read the goals.
They state that renting is bad.
They state that alcohol consumption is bad, and the less it happens, the better the world will be.
They state that equality of opportunity is good, and - independently of that - that inequality of outcome is bad. This despite the fact that equality of opportunity necessarily causes inequality of outcome.
In particular, they state that all subgroups however defined must achieve exactly the same educational outcomes across all metrics.
The family policies are that children (a) should be avoided in general, but also (b) should spend as little time in the home as possible. What do you think are the prerequisites for primary education?
They state that the poor should enjoy all the same comforts, services, and economic security that the rich do.
They establish a fixed quota for nature reserves.
They state that everyone's standard of living should go down.
That means, per IHRA, UNESCO is anti-semitic. Makes sense as anti-semitism is a problem worth tearing all post WW2 diplomacy and institutions up.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000385118
(Breakdown by beneficiary country & program is at the bottom of the page.)
I have come to think of UNESCO with regard to their World Heritage sites (I saw in the news that Neuschwanstein was just recently added), but one of my favorite science books when I was growing up I found was compiled by UNESCO, "700 Science Experiments For Everyone" [1]. I loved the way it showed you how to set up a modest "lab" with inexpensive (or found) things. Perhaps they were considering poorer communities/nations.
[1] https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780385052757
Seems about right.
Under the Obama administration, the US stopped financing UNESCO in 2011(!) after it voted to include Palestine as a member state that year.
The Trump administration decided to withdraw fully from the agency in 2017.
The Biden administration rejoined UNESCO in 2023 and agreed to pay it $600 million(!) in back dues.
Now, the Trump administration is quitting it again.
In fact this is an almost perfectly partisan issue, and the 2011 canard is giving cover to some horrifying both-sidesism.
And for what it's worth I never mentioned nor was thinking about "two sides," just multiple distinct administrations. Partisanship wearies me (and the parties have changed a lot over the last 20-30 years)
And when it became so, one party flipped its support so as to preserve funding, and the other did not. And so framing things like you do obscures the Very Important Fact that UNESCO support is an almost 100% partisan issue.
Frankly this sort of thing is so endemic on "the left" that at this point I tend to ascribe bad faith to arguments like this. If you really cared about this issue you'd find and work with your clear allies and not dump on them in internet comments.
That's within the current administration. Unless a change in congress can prevent this, it's a done deal.
I do agree with them that there is a 'rot' in these institutes. Though I don't know anything specific about the UNESCO that would warrant the withdrawal.
For institutes like the UN and UNRWA it does ring true however. It is wild to see claims of genocide where there isn't one and zero claims or calls for arrest when clear unambiguous genocidal massacres start taking place. UNRWA funded and run schools having theater classes where the children role-play murdering Jews is absurd and shouldn't be happening. (To name an example from before the 7th)
The UN should be setting a singular standard and holding everyone to account roughly equally. Not this clear and open corruption of its proclaimed principles. Whether it's in the main body or it's subsidiaries.
The current media and political landscape is a joke, there don't seem to be any standards. Frankly the future looks rather bleak. I really hope we can find to way back to 'common sense'. Good journalism, holding politicians to account and treating everyone equally, holding them to the same standards.
Someone observed a lot of stuff that Trump is doing is through Executive Orders because he really can't do deals. Of course when (some of) his desires overlap with (some of) others', we get:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Big_Beautiful_Bill_Act
which is mostly about implementing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
> […] so there is plenty of time to chicken out.
TACO:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/02/dona...
(Being reliant on TACO may backfire at some point.)
If you think that's incorrect you should consider the PR produced by the pro-socialization side and how it may have led to this situation.
If I was a time travelling space alien I would find it very funny that the Conservative Republican party is not conservative or republican in any recognizable way.
A party that pushes for a unitary executive cannot be republican.
An executive that carelessly breaks existing government functions cannot be conservative.
If I could say one thing to MAGA and have them hear and understand it, it would be this "Donald Trump is a politician". Understand that he is not a Savior. He is not a hero. He does not care about you any more than any other politician.
There are many ways to understand this administration; here are a couple that I wish people would use more often:
1. MAGA is a cluster of ideologies and special interest groups draped in a flag, wearing a crown. The cluster of ideologies and interest groups are not particularly well aligned. There are at least two distinct genres of America First. You have MAHA vs Corporate Interests. Traditional Hawks vs Isolationists. etc etc.
2. Trump uses psychological manipulation without shame. If your reply is that all politicians do this, see my one message above.
~~~
I've just re-read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.
There's a lot there, and it's honestly a bit painful right now; one thing I keep thinking about is "God is Change". There's a lot of ways to interpret that, but the one that I keep thinking about is: In an information game, playing the game changes the game.
Political and economic moves change the game of politics and economics. When you plan your moves (IF you plan your moves), consider not only where you are going on the board, but also how the board will look when you get there.
This isn’t just a blip, but part of a long-term downward trajectory in U.S. and UNESCO relations.
Why are you attributing Trumps actions to Obama. Stop it. Your comment is wholly dishonest.
Obama did not want to leave UNESCO. Period. Full stop.
"In 2011, the United States stopped funding Unesco because of what was then a forgotten, 15-year-old amendment mandating a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts Palestine as a full member. Various efforts by President Barack Obama to overturn the legal restriction narrowly failed in Congress, and the United States lost its vote at the organization after two years of nonpayment, in 2013."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220503183152/https://www.nytim...
>...means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group....
Besides Iceland, all UN member nations have a history of land acquisition through force, colonization, or dispossession. By their own definition, they're all guilty of genocide "in part" at some point in their histories, with several in the last 50 or 100 years.
[edit: kind of surprised this hasn't been flagged, but sadly indicative of HN's bias.]
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/decade-action-against-ant...
To be fair it looks like funding was cut during the Obama admin over the admittance of Palestine
In 2011, Obama was just following the law enacted by Congress not his wild ass opinions, which I know is crazy given the current administration.
[1] Public Law 101-246 (1990)
[2] Public Law 103-236 (1994)
See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20141224180231/https://foreignpo...
https://2017-2021.state.gov/the-united-states-withdraws-from...
Boring, been here before. UNESCO and world moved on. With some notable declarations like Demoscene and Techno music being added in a number of countries. Too bad those couldn't be added to a US registry also.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2011/11/1/us-halts-unesco...
(Yes, Obama did it first)
Congress locked obama into doing it.
I guess in today’s context where the executive treats the other two branches of gov as having a purely advisory role, this seems strange.
That said, the wording of the statement is... problematic.
They suffered absolutely zero consequences for this and the perpetrators have now been pardoned with no political backlash.
Why exactly wouldn't they do this? Now that the SCOTUS says they're even immune from prosecution, you'd have to be an idiot not to try.
Most photos don’t convey the actual size of it, because they just focus on the top crossbar, but even so, you can see just how ineffective that “noose” would be. If you search for a photo that shows it in full, you will see that a person could easily stand underneath it. It’s too short, and it is visibly crooked. If you tried to hang someone, it wouldn’t work.
I seriously doubt the people who made it had any connection to the people who stormed the building.
> Sure, they were at the event where people violently broke through police, into the capital, into offices and the chamber, looking for public officials with zip ties while chanting for death to specific members of Congress and the vice president... But the people with this specific noose prop probably only had good intentions.
It feels like every political discussion has just become an absolute clown show.
I never said they had good intentions. What I am saying is that that noose and gallows were obviously never intended to be used. The construction and dimensions of it are comical.
Unlike coup's which are distinct events, self-coup's are usually shades of grey. They happen through democratic backsliding, which usually consists of a large number of small events. I'm sure we'll see some more before the next election. Will it be enough so that the US is as bad as Russia or Turkey? No. Will it be enough to keep Trump in power illegally? Perhaps.
So they are definitely getting more organized, and I personally feel that they're testing the waters to see how much they can get their hands on after the '26 midterms. If they are able to sow enough uncertainty about the '26 elections then they can build on that for 2028. If they go this direction, how many elections can they invalidate, especially if > 1/3 of the country believes 2020 was stolen?
[1] https://www.cpr.org/2025/06/13/federal-request-colorado-vote...
[2] https://stateline.org/2025/07/16/trumps-doj-wants-states-to-...
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-doj-contacted-states-...
January 6 was part of it (some of the crowd were shouting "hang Mike Pence" for a reason"), but January 6 was just the last gasp of it.
People don't give Mike Pence nearly enough credit for, first, refusing to go along with the "alternate electors" nonsense, and second, for not leaving the Capitol when the Secret Service tried to get him out of there.
The fuck were you in 2020?
All they needed was Vance as VP to accept the alternate slate of electors and Trump would've won. Just run back that playbook in 2028.
1200 days, if we make it, well if there's a real election
I asked this when the administration decided to attack funding for research at Harvard University over wild claims, and I ask again, why are we willing to shoot ourselves in the knees for Israel?
For politics at large, there is a very powerful lobby.
A great talk from Mearsheimer on the subject https://youtu.be/RTksWA1I2UI The man deserves upmost respect to have courageously spoken and written about it, all along. On a more recent video he mentions the level of threats and attacks he has been subject to for his exposing of that lobby.
I consider myself a moderate's moderate and I do see where everyone's coming from, but if you held a gun to my head I'd probably agree with you: it's not actually about Israel.
The Bible foretells the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and the subsequent rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem as a precursor to the end times. IE, without Israel, Christians don't get to go to heaven.
You think if Harvard went “America first,” he’d be trying to shut them down?
I know that's written kind of lazily and off the cuff but it really hits home how deep the various agencies must be in needing them as a conduit for their actions.
Ummm...what?
This is the kind of nonsense that makes me want to leave this country.
So go, if you're not going to fight it.
If you’re a founder in that situation and want to bring your startup with you, send me an email, especially if you’re looking to have a startup in defence/cybersecurity/ai. I made it a mission to help people in this situation to move. Contact on my profile.
I'm not thrilled about what current US administration is doing when it comes to international NGOs. UNESCO is one example.
However, there's also another problem: various UN bodies became tools for international politics instead of doing what they were originally designed to do. It's another example of good will easily subverted by malicious actors to serve shady political goals.
These international organizations need restructuring that would introduce some sort of a watchdog that would make sure these organizations don't overstep their aria of responsibility. Similarly to how constitutional democracies usually have separation of power and multiple branches of government that are supposed to counterbalance each other.
My layman understanding of the reason for UNESCO existence is the preservation of cultural heritage. This shouldn't be political. This should be based on historical or archeological knowledge as well as arts. However, UNESCO as well as eg. UNICEF and other similar orgs shamelessly engage in political activism that has nothing to do with conservation efforts. The officers of these organizations haven't been elected to represent political wishes of their constituents. They bare no responsibility for the effects of political propaganda they are spreading, but it's impossible to prevent them from doing something they shouldn't be doing by all accounts.
Bad political actors found a way to subvert and misuse organizations that were intended for a good cause. We need to figure out a way to fight this subversion. Defunding is both too late, and comes at a cost of not having an organization that cares about preservation of historical heritage or the rights of children etc.
Children in gaza are being intentionally starved by israel blocking food aid. At least 15 people including one infant have been starved to death in the past 24 hours.
UNESCO’s mission is preservation of cultural heritage. Gaza and the west bank are being ethnically cleansed, and their arts and culture have already been physically destroyed by US bombs dropped by israel. This will destroy cultural groups, thus leaving little to preserve.
The world is political. You give someone a goal of preserving culture, or protecting children, and all of a sudden they’ll start speaking out when you destroy culture and starve children.
The problem is that UNICEF doesn't just provide help. It feels entitled to come up with resolutions that put the blame on one of the parties in the conflict. They aren't military experts. They don't honestly know how the situation came to be the way it is... they shouldn't be talking about it.
Because, what happens is that while they aren't the experts on the subject they choose to opine on, they have a large audience who will listen to them (for other reasons), and they can be mistaken for experts.
When you read an opinion piece from a newspaper, or listen to a politician talking about the issue, you would be right to assume that these people have a degree of familiarity and expertise in the subject they are talking about. Of course, the world isn't ideal, and often times these sources also lack expertise, but this is where the opinions and information should come from. Newspapers are held accountable through various policies for what they publish. So are politicians. But a UNICEF officer, when it comes to politics, is just a private person, like you and I... except they aren't treated like you and I.
---
Just to illustrate this further. You believe that:
> Children in gaza are being intentionally starved by israel blocking food aid.
But this is propaganda. There's no way to substantiate this claim. Israeli side claims that Hamas is hoarding aid (or was hoarding, until Israel created an alternative aid distributing organization). So, the aid was coming through, but Hamas used it to extract resources and favors from its constituents.
Maybe true. Maybe not. Neither you nor I know this for a fact. The investigation hasn't commenced yet. And neither you nor I are experts with enough information about the situation on the ground to have reasonable grounds to believe one way or another. Neither is UNICEF. And yet they go out and proclaim that they are, and that the situation is the way they want to see it... And here you are, trapped in this propaganda stream, repeating something you have no actual reason to believe.
Unless I get to see actual evidence, I'm not inclined to believe this claim. I see articles report things like: "Since the GHF was launched, Israeli forces have killed more than 400 Palestinians trying to collect food aid, the UN and local doctors say. Israel says the new distribution system stops aid going to Hamas."
And yet there is 0 video evidence of the IDF shooting at them? I don't believe it. There is so much video and pictures floating around social media, yet we don't have any for this claim?
All I can find are articles like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/04/middleeast/israel-militar.... All you can see is people taking cover by lying prone on the ground.
Or this one by Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/7/15/video-sho...
Which again shows people prone, bullets shot near them this time.
There's been so much horse-shit and propaganda, I'm not going to believe any claim, unless it is accompanied by direct video evidence.
I understand healthy skepticism, but the healthy skeptical response would be “lets get more oversight into place” not “it’s all lies until i see the right video”
The fact that you can see I'm actually looking for sources, should at least prove to you that I'm trying to verify. In this case I can find no direct video evidence of the claim. And the only news source using a video with no casualties, but at least there's gunfire, is from Al Jazeera. Hardly unbiased.
I do want to know why you think there wouldn't be an overwhelming amount of video evidence at this point. This claim has been made multiple times, there is a lot of video footage being filmed and shared constantly, yet nothing about this specific one?
This is basically just criticizing Israel for having the means. Clearly both have the will. The two parties are locked into a death pact with each other.
Do you even know what the intifada means? Or are you using foreign words to make it sound scary?
Source pls?
I understand this is what a lot of people who HEAR “the intifada” believe - but is it what a lot of people who SAY “the intifada” believe?
No, it’s criticizing israel for the will, the means, and the action of murdering tens of thousands and starving millions.
> Hamas, who run Gaza, want to "Globalize the Intifada" and bring violence to Jews worldwide
This is one interpretation of that phrase. Intifada means roughly “shaking off”. A call for international support for shaking off the oppression of Palestinians is how it’s usually understood. I’m not here to defend hamas, but using the words of hamas to excuse the genocide of all palestinians (including in the west bank where hamas does not exist) is disgusting. Like using the words of trump to justify shooting up a walmart.
But you are right in that if hamas was doing the same thing that israel is doing UNESCO and UNICEF would be “getting political” about that too.
And I could always say "the final solution" is referring to my math homework. In the context of the Palestinian occupation, intifada ALWAYS is meant as violent. There is no other interpretation.
Pretending that it doesn't is both bad faith and classic taqiyya.
Sounds like violence was a small component of the first intifada. So, tell me again how it always means violence? And also how did you get from violence against israeli occupation to violence against all jews?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalize_the_intifada
I was only raised in it. I couldn't possibly know anything.
It is political when cultures are being eradicated. Tibet is one of several examples.
It's AIPAC, a money laundering operation disguised as political lobbying, ensuring a steady flow of money from the US treasury to Israel govt. and back to the Congress. Check the amount your Senator receives from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
From AIPAC themselves: (https://www.aipacpac.org/)
> Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.
> %98 of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general elections.
> $70M contributed through AIPAC to support pro-Israel candidates.
> We helped defeat 24 candidates who would have undermined the US-Israel relationship.
Democracy anybody?
Now imagine Russia had a similar organization, what would the reaction be? Yet when it's Israel, it's somehow fine.
From Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC)
> AIPAC was founded in 1954 by Isaiah L. Kenen, a lobbyist for the Israeli government, partly to counter negative international reactions to Israel's Qibya massacre of Palestinian villagers that year.
Are you implying that just because your profession is A you must know B?
There are tons of people that do things for a living and know nothing about it, and purposefully avoid all initiatives to seek the truth.
America First continues to be Israel First.
Talking about Ep stein.
I suspect he will make a major war, and invoke military rule or whatever, before the next election, in order to continue in power.
I suppose that Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan/India/China, Georgia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and so on just never happened?
Not doubting that war is on the horizon, but the USA is addicted to war, and many other nations had their own issues independently of the USA.
> The "Long Peace" is a term for the unprecedented historical period of relative global stability following the end of World War II in 1945 to the present day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_globalization
I hope you learn something today.
I struggle to consider Syria, Myanmar, Somalia, or Sudan minor conflicts. Likewise, what is the measure of stability here considering the rate of civil wars and country creation?
There will be a national emergency declared unsurprisingly to push back the election. Some states will perform some form of election to the best of their ability. Then SCOTUS declares that the unitary executive has the power to do this and we're in for a rough ride.
That being said, this UNESCO departure is a nothingburger that has more to do with Israel solidarity than anything else.
Structural change is needed, which is unlikely to happen, and the depth of the destruction of the machine of government cannot be rebuilt in less than a decade, and that's just the foundation upon which reputation is then built.
All stable democracies derive a goodwill by honoring certain values even if a previous political party made them.
This is intentionally being thrown out of the window for what the other side perceives to be something done to them (arresting Trump, assassination attempts). Which the first side can justify on the grounds of what was done to them (Jan 6th), which is the other side can justify on the grounds of what was done to them (2020 election issues) and so on.
Any attempts to look for the "source" of the problem (i.e figuring out who started it) is choosing a side and not trying to solve the problem.
> I really hope a future Congress will undo this fucking mess... otherwise the US is probably never going to catch back up to what it used to be. Voters made a terrible mistake.
Putting too much power into the president is part of the problem.
We have deep structural and cultural issues that date back a VERY long time and it's unclear how to fix them, or even if they are fixable. Just look up some of what Tocqueville had to say about populism and anti-intellectualism in America as far back as 1831.
The damage to intelligence agencies in particular is something I fear may never be undone. I feel like the US is potentially out of the game forever.
And, of course, the follow-up question: did anyone have it on a Harris bingo card?
The worrying part is that this is world's first military power, and (still) the first economic power...
No comments yet
We aren't Israeli citizens. Why are we treated like we are?
Like, how that ever became OK is insane to me.
Nah, I just think that in the 21st century, people shouldn't invade a country, kill all their children, and steal all their land.
But instead it has turned into a word that is used to try to shut down any criticism. Things get labeled as such, schools and others have a zero acceptance policy and here we are.
I have never seen a school having an "un-patriotic" policy. I would say even the opposite, they encourage getting involved in the government and making your voice heard.
I can say and criticize a lot of crap about my government without worrying about being kicked out of school or anything like that. The most I may be called is "unpatriotic" but I think most people here (maybe at least until recently) recognized that that was one of our core freedoms.
The same is not true if I tried to criticize one foreign government in particular.
shower thought, maybe you aren't, if we look at history, the closest analogy is:
you are the equivalent of 'natives' in the colonial era where the vassal states population have all the obligations (and more) and none of the rights and need to jump through hoops to show allegiance and maybe gain it at the individual level as a reward in the end.
And the left does the same kind of thing when it suits them.
Left/right is not a useful distinction for the present moment. The recent mayoral elections in New York and Minneapolis suggest that the relevant divide is pro/anti Zionist. You have Democrats, Republicans, Donald Trump, Silicon Valley and the media establishment on one side; with campus leftists, Tucker Carlson, Saagar Enjeti and global public opinion on the other.
What happened?
I don’t think people are at all understanding that they are in an abusive relationship and have been all their lives and so have all the people around them all their lives for many generations now. We have all been born into a cult and that cult is all we know, so we are afraid to even just contemplate for a moment that it could all just be lies and abuses by liars and abusers.
If they can get you to voluntarily believe crazy things and do abusive things, they can get you to believe and do anything. That applies to the full political spectrum and for most people.
It’s not a farce. It’s something way worse.
Edit: I am in no way saying conservatism is bad and liberalism is good. I have my values in both.
A lot of people treat politics like they behave in the HN comment section: They see the headline, arrive at a conclusion based on previous assumptions, and head straight to the comment section to argue their side without ever even making an effort to read the article. With politics, politicians are experts at crafting headlines and sound bites that feed these people their confirmation bias and tickle the part of the brain that says this person is on your side.
I’ve had some success discussing issues with these people calmly and openly, adding facts one at a time until they realize the situation isn’t what they thought. There are a lot of “That can’t be right” lightbulbs going off as the facts start to conflict with their idea of how the world works. This goes for both extremes of the political spectrum, BTW.
This can be a problem when the political 'class' (politicians of course, but also media commentators, journalists, podcasters, whatever) do not realise this issue. Brexit is a classic example, where the UK prime minister called for a referendum possibly confident that 'no one' would actually vote yes.
I certainly do not love the Trump admin and think Kamala would easily do better. However, that does not mean the Trump admin has done nothing I agree with. There are nice parts to the OBBB that directly benefit me. Further, I think the approach to H1Bs, removing the lottery and instead basing it on salary, is the right move.
I say this because regardless of admin, there's going to be things you like and dislike. What seems to happen is people get completely sucked in a media bubble which only reports the good or bad of their political opponents.
Even the worst and most evil world leaders in history did good or had some good policies. There's never been a pure evil or good leader. Unfortunately, people want to flatten the world and remove the nuance "if so and so did it, it must be good/bad".
Your line of thinking is like saying that the British Raj was terrible for India, but the British built railways, which was a good thing. Good and bad do not exist in isolation. The British built railways in india so they could more effectively extract wealth, not out of the benevolence of their hearts. It is much the same with the US government.
Back to the british railway example. You are correct that it was there to more efficiently extract wealth (bad). But that does not mean that rails aren't hugely beneficial to the population in general. Roads in the US exist primarily to aid in rapid shipping, that doesn't mean roads are a bad thing because a company like Amazon gets the majority of the benefit.
It's a basically non-existent politician that does something purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. In a democracy, it's the role of the electorate to try and remove politicians from power who refuse to provide benefits to the citizens as a whole.
The people I know who support this regime do so because they feel completely left out (they're low income so I'm not sure that applies to software developers).
When there's nothing for you why wouldn't you want to just burn it all down? Then you can build a more "fair" system.
Please note that I do not agree with literally anything current admin does, this is just the perspective I hear often.
Notably, the people who lived under legal oppression for centuries in this country did not take this approach. Instead, they worked inside the system and were able to affect change. The "burn it down" side ended up having its cities literally burned down.
They probably also feel left out by their current regime, and "just burn it all down" would be done more efficiently by other ways, or with other choices.
There's still a part that resonates enough that they're willing to support a specific message.
You'll have to forgive me for being suspicious, but I hear these arguments, too, and the people I see who feel "left out" are largely left out because they hold fringe beliefs or because they are told they are left out despite actually being part of highly influential groups.
Being able to code isn't the end-all-be-all skillset the industry likes to pretend it is.
For the record - I think those same intelligent people overlook the externalities (a personal military for the executive branch) of such a disruptive administration, or irrationality disbelieved it would ever happen.
That’s why they’re burning money on life extension moonshots.
And what will happen in 22nd century and onwards is no great concerns for us here.
To me it's very clear why the government is leaving UNESCO (and over time the UN at large). The UN is dysfunctional and does not work. It used to be a source of soft power for the States, but hasn't been so for the better part of this century. Meanwhile, the US continues to fund it even though it is currently running a massive deficit. It doesn't make sense to continue throwing good money after bad, especially when funds are scarce. Let other nations pick up the funding slack. Likely they will not and the UN will collapse, as it should. Something new can be built from its ashes. Many people agree with this rather pragmatic view.
If you want to have a discussion, debate the points I made above instead of hurling insults and ad hominem attacks.
The US budget is ~$7T annually. There is $50B to spend deporting critical parts of our workforce. There is $1T in defense spending to ensure that we spend more than the next 9(!) militaries combined*. Et cetera.
The US spends ~$18B supporting UN programs. This is ~0.003% of the federal budget.
The point here is funds are not scarce, and in any case to the extent that one is concerned about spending, the UN spend is not the driver. The rest of your point is consistent, there's no need to use the red herring about lack of money.
* I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War. Americans were told that as the Soviet threat withdrew, we could expect a "peace dividend" now that we didn't need to spend so much on defense. Inflation-adjusted, we spend more now than at the peak of the Cold War.
Given the threat matrix today that includes fantasies such as "US land war against its third-largest trading partner" and the absurd "protracted war against a developing nation currently being fought to stalemate by a country smaller than California," I am not sure this increased spend makes sense. Seems like the only scenario that justifies our military spend is when a President decides to blow a wad of lives & cash in some utterly wasteful conflict.
U.S. can't afford $18 billion of non-essential spending. It can't afford $1 billion of non-essential spending. In fact, it can't afford $1 of non-essential spending.
The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it" is just incomprehensible to me.
And it's not just UN. It's $47 billion to USAID, $9 billion to NPR, $10 billion to California's "never gonna happen" rail, $1.3 billion to Harvard and that's just a small part of spending.
US government still needs to go on a serious spending diet. But every cut gets people to catastrophize how the world will end if US doesn't fund UN or Harvard.
> The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it"
This is not the argument. The argument is more along the lines that our leadership just weeks ago rallied around a sharp increase in the rate of our debt accretion, so obviously erasing the debt is not a political priority at this time.
Given that erasing the debt is not a political priority, good stewardship demands that deficit spending should align with uses that will generate positive long-term financial returns to Americans (e.g. cancer research) instead of negative returns (deporting agricultural and construction workforces).
Making cuts that will have the effect of slowing the long-run growth rate of the US economy and its overall competitiveness will also make it harder to erase the debt should that ever become a political priority.
A government that does not collect sufficient taxes to fund its priorities can somehow always claim that funds are scarce. But that's a) a choice and b) can be rectified any time by shifting priorities (see: military budget, for ex.) or collecting more revenue.
It's fine to say "I don't care that there is a body where nations can defuse conflict without war," but it's disingenuous to pretend there simply is not money for it.
- some spending is objectively more necessary than other spending. Funding UNESCO is not that important. I detailed why we shouldn’t do so even were we running a $1T budget in another comment.
- UNESCO is not responsible for “defus[ing] conflict without war.” The vast majority of the UN is not.
It's fine to say we should not participate in the UN/UNESCO for ideological reasons, but we don't have to take leave of our faculties and engage with the silly notion that this administration cares about the debt or deficit.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit supporting removal of pointless spending any more than it means I’ll support the OBBBA. I’m not going to adopt a sunk-cost fallacy that “well, they just pissed away even more money, so throwing the UN a few billion to further chicom propaganda and political narratives I oppose is fine.” That’s not a facile position.
I agree it’s not going to make a huge difference in the debt but we don’t have the money to burn. The fact that congress and the president ignored that doesn’t make it less true or compel me to do so for this case. There isn’t this bargaining thing happening where trump’s OBBBA pisses away trillions more therefore now it’s acceptable to piss away billions on anti-american global organizations.
If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.
BTW: I would love to hear which wars did UN stop?
It seems to me that recently US, not UN, stopped Houthis from bombing ships, stopped India-Pakistan conflict, derailed Iran's nuclear plans and is making progress on Israel-Palestine conflict.
All I hear from UN is pro-palestine, anti-israel virtue signaling and zero action or even a realistic plan to help end those conflicts.
Yes. I am okay with increasing debt (currently costing 2% after inflation) to increase long-term US stability and competitiveness. I am not okay with increasing debt to decrease long-term US stability and competitiveness, as we are doing now.
It had several remits, but its most important is probably the one to prevent a world war. It’s designed specifically as a talking shop to help countries find other ways of resolving disputes than kill people - and promote international understanding . It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.
Fair enough. It's worth noting though, that China benefits when the US withdraws from stuff like this.
The current state of the world would definitely beg to differ
I would argue that it's not practical to burn the current system down without a plan at all for the next system (like the ACA a few years ago. . .)
My concern isn't change. My concern is the complete lack of concern for consequences. Like it or not, the US is and has been on the decline in terms of world authority. Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in. You think that country has any amount of give a crap about humanity as a whole? Not even a little, I would argue.
So, again, for many people, it's not that the UN is perfect (or even functional in my opinion). It's that there is, has been, and seems like there will never be an actual plan. Am I wrong?
If China wants to foot the bill, let them. As I pointed out, the US hasn't been getting anything in return for the last 25 years of footing the bill, basically since 9/11. China cares about its people. They are currently fighting back against privilege and conspicuous consumption by the elites [1]. The CCP knows that an open revolt would destabilize their grip. After all, they themselves rode a populist wave into power.
I think of it like the Tour de France. Sometimes to win the race you need to move into second place, conserve your resources, and let someone else face the headwinds.
The comment about change felt like an ad hominem attack.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg7827pwlro
Thoughtful, conservative isolationists don't mix up their questions about how important soft power is really with threats to annexe Canada or attempts to get the Brazilian Supreme Court to drop a case through tariff policy. Or indeed rant incessantly about how much of a threat China is whilst doing everything possible to drive the rest of the world into their arms.
And the Tour de France is not a Peleton. You are being disingenuous.
Even if this were true - and Commodore Perry, Manifest Destiny, and our zealous pursuit of trade among other skeletons of history fly in the face of this - why would we want to return to a status quo when we are so far removed from it now? The global landscape has changed, and we were the primary motivator of that change. After decades of assassinations of political leaders abroad and shock doctrine economic policies, we are to pack up our bloody toys and go home? The moral objections aside, this is a foolish and shortsighted policy that leaves only chaos. We will not preserve anything about our way of life, because it's been spliced with the genes of a globalized, post ww2 administrative world we created.
A peloton is a line of cyclists with riders taking it turns to voluntarily relinquishing the lead to conserve energy. Happens a lot in Tour De France. Pretty much exactly the situation your analogy attempted to describe. (If you're only aware of the branded exercise equipment, maybe don't use cycling race analogies and definitely don't confuse people possessing knowledge you lack with disingenuousness)
Got to enjoy the irony of someone accusing me of being disingenuous for knowing slightly more than zero about cycle races, whilst simultaneous arguing that a mad child shouting about annexing Canada is either isolationism or the "US returning to its roots" though.
I mean, I guess the US did have a mad king once and, separately, an attempt to annex Canada. Neither of those had anything even slightly to do with the principle of isolationism either, and I don't think either of them were successful enough for any sane Americans to want to return to them :D
You pointed this out but provided no evidence.
"I'm paying for these traffic lights with these taxes but all they do is slow me down"
The UN has no power, so dismantling it cannot leave a power vacuum. The US abandoning its overseas policies, that'd leave a power vacuum, because the US has power and projects it. But the UN has no power - it's some UN member states that have power.
Case in point: the general assembly demanded Russia withdraw all military forces from Ukraine. But what are they going to do about Russia ignoring that demand? Nothing, they're powerless.
Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
With that context in mind, it's difficult to understand your perspective. You've only thrown out your opinion instead of facts, and then - in a preemptive defensive posture - claim any criticism will be insults or ad hominem attacks.
You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
> You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
> If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this. Truth is it never changed. It is still very much regional hegemons governing their parts of the world. The only difference being that the hegemonic boundaries are not defined by homogeneous geographic regions. If you read the world news carefully, you will realize that all conflicts are tied to the boundaries between two or more hegemons.
[1] https://unsceb.org/fs-revenue-government-donor
Fact. Another fact: this is a rounding error for the US government's budget. The total spend is under $15b. Government spending has been $5t to $7.5t in the last decade. Why is this particular spending line item of such interest to you? Do you truly see zero value derived from investment in the UN? Is that perhaps because you require some benefit to Americans from the investment? About 2/3rds of UN spending is on development and humanitarian assistance. Is helping the rest of the world raise the standard of living a laudable goal for the richest country in the world to contribute to or not, in your eyes?
> Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
Perhaps one root difference in belief is that I don't believe the UN is an alliance, and you do. It is a forum for countries that belong to different alliances to have a forum to talk to each other. It also is a forum to build temporary alliances for military intervention (e.g., Iraq War I) across such boundaries. The US failed miserably at building such a consenus for Iraq War II and has been
> If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this.
Thank you. I understand your zero-sum argument and realpolitik in general, both from an academic and personal perspective. I grew up in a third-world country, so - perhaps, unlike you - I'm intimately familiar with the impact of Great Power games in the post-Cold War era. You are unfortunately correct; I wish that the US (my home for several decades now) tried harder to move away from such thinking and utilized the UN for more win-win scenarios, but we're moving away from such liberal thinking, and so my wish will probably remain unfulfilled.
Now it seems that the current administration is too much for people here to handle. I wonder if the mods have noticed the same thing, or maybe they support it at this point.
If you screw your counterparty over in every negotiation, you erode trust and end up without allies.
That’s fine in a business setting, if you’re self-capitalized (although Trump famously ran into issues after burning bridges with most banks), because you can do without them.
It works less effectively in a forum of sovereign nations, where you’re going to need to deal with CountryX tomorrow and ten years from now.
The US is ceding the soft power and web of alliances that are the basis of its economic and hard power.
The US, without allies, loses to China strictly on the basis of population.
“America first” is “America alone” with an orange spray tan.
This article makes the case that the 1965 Immigration Act happened not because anyone in the US wanted it but because the State Dept. pressured Congress to pass it in order to make more allies with Third World countries https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/geopolitical-origins.... Basically the UN was used as a forum by countries to trash the US which it still is. The USSR propagandized against the US in the Third World.
So honestly the whole UN experiment seems like it was kind of a foreign policy wonk experiment that didn't really serve the interests of US citizens especially now that the USSR fell. But I think the philosophical ideas behind it run very strong in elitist thought in the US. These are that 1) Nationalism is an ever present threat to global peace 2) social engineering should be used to prevent Nationalism/Nazis/etc. 3) Immigration is a tool for statecraft and limiting Nationalism in certain countries. 4) an enlightened class of smarter, educated people should be used to counter Nationalism.
If any of these goals or assumptions are false the whole thing becomes useless.
Where I get frustrated is when the admin turns around and massively expands the deficit by throwing cargo ships full of money at other wasteful, in my opinon, programs. That tells me the fiscal responsibility talk was just a pretense to do another kind of money grab and "own the libs" at the same time. And at the end of the day the argument reduces to opinions on what is wasteful and what is not.
Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?
> Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?
Okay, what has it done that has aligned with US interests?
That's how I know the UN no longer matters.
Similarly, many countries have sanctioned both Hamas (and/or other groups like PIJ, etc.) and/or individual Palestinians for acts against Israeli civilians as well as Israel and/or Israeli politicians for acts against Palestinian civilians.
For instance: Both Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have been sanctioned by the UK, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Australia for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian civilians."
And yet all of these countries also condemn Hamas and their atrocities....
Says the person using an international communication network orchestrated by the UN...
Go look at where the money goes. This is not it.
The UNSC isn’t an arbitrator of good, but an alignment of hard UN outcomes with the first countries to have nukes (and therefore the ability to force the issue militarily if they disagreed with the UN).
This is not proven. Why would China want to wreck Taiwan? Official US, Taiwanese, and Mainland China policy is that there is one China. Taiwan is like Texas being a breakaway republic run by confederates in the USA, though the culture has evolved in a more progressive direction (more progressive than USA) since the original breakup.
> It’s a bit incomplete to bring up Security Council vetoing without mentioning Russia (currently at war with a sovereign nation)
I'll give you that's bad, but at least it's a fight between nations and not a genocide. I believe the U.S. instigated this fight by advancing NATO territory eastward and my position is there should be peace negotiations immediately.
For the same reasons most wars have been fought: belief (primacy of CCP), resources (uncontested access to the Pacific), and the economy (don’t worry about that, ra ra flag).
> [Russia and Ukraine] not a genocide
One of the definitions of genocide is forced relocation of children and eradication of culture, both of which Russia is doing in the Ukrainian territories it occupies.
All parties seem to be exercising their right, the US does not have a monopoly on it.
Among other things, it called for Yemen to stop attacking Israeli shipping, which is one of the few acts by a country that is fulfilling its international obligation to intervene to stop genocide. Yemen has repeatedly stated that it will stop when Israel stops its genocide in Gaza and proved it when it stopped during the ceasefire.
It seems objective that many civilians have been killed and a lot of land stolen.
But my point is that things that seem objective to one group of people might be objectively false to another group.
Which isn't to say that there is no real truth. Just that the premises people hold are so different that the worlds are not compatible.
- Information bubbles (this is the top issue, and it's really incredibly persuasive)
- Geographic location and social environment
- Lack of time to deeply evaluate truth vs noise and consider multiple sides of an issue
- Conviction of values - how much does a person believe their values are tied to the political view (leads to subtly drawing emotional conclusions and implicitly trusting a political party)
- Belief that due to one's own intelligence, one is not subject to propaganda (a clearly false belief that many smart people fall into)
Deep emotional awareness is not as strongly related to intelligence as people think.
I agree -- it is surprising how many high achieving people have such poor understanding of how the world/society/countries work. It's almost like our education system's specificity hasn't done a good job on civics broadly.
Not only in their own lives, but as the primary measure of success.
One side effect of this is that they stop investing effort in things that don’t generate material wealth.
Personally, I think that tends to turn people into dicks (non-transaction friendships are valuable to me), but they do them.
They _are_ smart people. There's more to the differences in perspective than "lib smart, maga stupid".
It almost doesn’t even make grammatical sense to say “raising prices will lower prices”, let alone any kind of rational sense.
In my experience I have seldom seen people who believe 100% in whatever party/government does. Most of the time it's a few topics that matter - be it immigration, or less taxes, or whatever. However, they are not gonna protest for leaving UNESCO. They might find it stupid, but probably they find topic XYZ more important. So they suck it up and move on.
Then there are the believers - everything the administration does is great. But I like to believe and think they are a minority.
There's a lot of MAGA hats out there man. Historically, has it ever been a good thing when so many people believe everything one man says is pure truth? I mean, even if I agreed with every policy, the extent and dedication of this cultish behaviour would give me pause.
The worst ideas come from the smart people who can persuade themselves and others of inevitable success.
After one particular discussion he conceeded: "I know you're factually correct, but I don't care, because this is what I want". And this is the point were further discussion was useless.
I'm not going to be another Nazi at the table.
I'm totally fine debating whether the sky is blue with someone claiming it's gray because it is usually overcast. I'm happy to entertain the motion that the sky could be bronze - with a reference to ancient Greece and pretty sunsets. At the end of the day we can just agree to disagree and move on.
But I'm not going to debate whether the sky is blue with someone yelling that the sky MUST be green because obviously clouds are green. They have moved so far from the truth that they are either arguing in bad faith or just plain delusional. Neither case is worth even the slightest snippet of my time: I'd have a better chance of success trying to explain my viewpoint to a tree. It isn't politics anymore, it has turned into religion or sports.
I personally blame social media and the financialization of everything for this. A person's entire self-worth can be reduced to the size of their 401K and their instagram reels (brunch, dog, destination wedding, hike, repeat).
Depressing.
If someone who seems smart disagrees with me then there's only 1 explanation
just remember, there is nothing more easy to manipulate than an insecure male.
Edit: removing a sentence that came across as offensive.
Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
Perhaps it's "how can I get more for myself?" versus "how I improve the lives of humanity?".
But I can see how it can read as an “attack”, I’ll update the comment. Thanks for calling it out!
We see a bodybuilder good at lifting things, or a bricklayer good at building houses, and we don't assume they also have an opinion on nicomachean ethics that should be entertained. Similar, usually, with entertainers. But we sometimes assume that someone really good at structuring database queries for optimal retrieval efficiency must respect the separation of labor from capital value or the challenges of providing for the needs of eight billion people because they are people.
I have to assume it's because we think that if you're good at one "labor of the mind" you must be good at the others (and, probably, because too few of us also have nearly enough respect for how much thought goes into making a wall that won't fall down).
It has also made me realize how difficult life was for my parents and grandparents, who were all born before the civil rights act.
The civil rights act passed when Trump was in college so he and the other elderly members of the other branches also saw the lead up to it. Every action I see is to prevent anything like that again. Or to personally enrich themselves.
Engs all think they and their peers are very logical and super smart. They must be because of all the world changing apps/services/monies they make...? I've fallen in to this trap.
I had no idea my Dad had gone down that path, or why...
I've been on this earth a long time, and I too realize I don’t know anything about human nature or intellect.
I'm not a US citizen and did not have to make a choice, but I could see plenty of reasons not to vote for the Democratic candidate: the establishment had tried to run a candidate that was obviously unfit for office and parachuted a replacement at the last minute; the Democratic response to covid was atrocious (yes, the irony of Trump capturing that slice of the vote does not escape me); the issue of males (transwomen) in female sports and prisons...
Whether those reasons outweighed the obvious (to me) negatives is everyone's choice to make when casting their vote... but the inability to understand the other side (and brag about it) seems odd for all the smart people here.
I share the same horrible experience of having these last 10 years open my eyes wide to the reality of humanity.
I know many of “those people” and not a single one of them religious.
American leftist insults always go like this - X is bad, but only if it originated from us. The self loathing is amazing.
* Religion is bad, but only if it’s Christianity. * Men are bad, unless they’re trans * Gender is a social construct, but race is real * culture is important, unless it’s associated with whites, because they don’t have culture
Right wing is a semi balancing act * religion is good, unless Muslim * men aren’t necessarily good or bad. They can be heros or villains * boys naturally fight with sticks, it’s not taught * American culture is just as valid as any other
Not exactly a mirror image, but enough team loyalty and justification goes on so people can pat themselves on the back as smart while the other team is delusional
Looking back I blame the Democrats for running horrible candidates and the gaslighting that their candidates were actually great and were as "cool" as the Trump team. It just felt so disingenuous when you heard Democrats saying that Biden was still very with it and even more disingenuous when they said that Harris/Walz were a great pick. And now the folks that said it was disingenuous were not wrong, cause after the campaign ended and Trump was in office seemingly everyone that praised Biden and then Harris then flipped the script and started saying what everyone was thinking all along (that Biden was not fit to serve and Harris wasn't a great candidate).
I talked to alot of guys that flipped from D to R this past election and just about every one of them said a version of: "do they think we are stupid??".
The Democrats have a hubris problem, they think that just because they run someone and tell folks that the person is great, everyone will just automatically buy into that. That's just not how it works and you have to make a genuinely convincing argument and that argument can't be "the other guys is worse"
The party is defined as being composed of the people who are already elected. So the priority of the Democratic Party ends up reflecting the priorities of those who are already in office, which is to make sure the incumbents get reelected.
This means there's very little incentive to expand the electorate (which would mean younger voters, who are likely to vote younger candidates, so that threatens the aging incumbents), or spend resources in expanding the map (because by definition there are no incumbents there whose interests are represented in the party).
For as advanced as the US political system is, it's incredibly backwards when it comes to professionalization of the political parties. A good comparison is the BJP in India. Setting aside policy, ideological issues for a moment, what they're really good at is being professional. The head of the party is not elected, and constantly rotates the party representative in each election, keeping their bench deep. They also have a soft age limit.
In a way, Donald Trump's greatest contribution to the Republican Party was destroying the incumbency advantage for Republicans. As a result the Republican slate was completely refreshed with younger (although generally worse) candidates, but while it may have made the party significantly worse from a policy/ideology perspective, it has made it politically stronger.
Sometime, cruelty is the point and there is only delusion in trying to project "good reasons". It is loosing strategy.
1. Intelligence does not transfer across domains. E.g. being good at making money doesn't necessarily make you qualified in other areas. And vice versa, as Isaac Newton is famously quoted as saying "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of men" after losing a ton of money in the South Sea Bubble.
2. Many (most) people view their identity as a membership in some group, however that is defined. Most people like to pretend to argue about policy, but they're really arguing about their group membership.
3. Admitting you were wrong and changing your opinion is incredibly difficult for most people, perhaps even moreso for people who are nominally smart in other domains. Doubly so if it goes against your group membership as pointed out in #2.
Regarding "And it’s wild to think that more than 1/3 of the devs I’ve met in my life support this admin" specifically, at least in my experience, many of the devs don't support Trump as much as they chaffed against some of the cultural changes Democrats led (woefully unsuccessfully in my opinion) and so they hooked their wagon to Trump. E.g. this is my personal opinion, but I think "the left" really did go overboard with language policing, recognizing racial group membership above all else when it comes to diversity, labeling any valid discussion of the pros and cons of biological men in women's sports as "transphobic", the utter dishonesty in pretending Biden would be capable for another term and thus denying a real primary, etc. etc. And, to be blunt about it, for a very long time the Democratic party had almost nothing to offer for white men - indeed, in many aspects "old white men" became an acceptable derogatory term amongst the left. How they expected that would win them elections in the US is beyond me.
So don't get me wrong, I think Trump is worse in nearly every way, but I think a lot of the dev supporters I've seen of Trump are less full-on MAGA folks than libertarian types who thought Trump would challenge the excesses of the left (and are now having a hard time admitting his full-on fascist behavior).
If you have false beliefs as the basis for your computation you just get wrong results faster.
What people mean by intelligent person is often someone who: - has more computing power - spends their time using that computing power - checks their assumptions and biases regularly - over time accumulates more correct beliefs than others
If you get lots of computing power but don't do the other things - you get a dumber person than average. Because they accumulate more wrong results than everybody else.
This is how you get tech bros - great at math and programming, dumb as a shoe about everything else.
Those seemingly smart people are likely all smart. But they have no idea how to take their skills from one area and apply them to another. So they fall for really stupid BS outside their area of specialization.
In the first term Trump hired a lot of retired or retiring generals. They may not have been subject matter experts, but that's fine, since they had subject matter experts within their departments, and they had the ability to organize, lead and execute.
But most importantly, most of them had a pretty strong sense of ethics and loyalty to the country and constitution.
The generals, and the people they hired, and even the Trump lackeys who were nonetheless being watched by the generals, helped keep Trump's worst impulses in check.
In Term 2, on the other hand, Trump has explicitly picked people who are completely unqualified (this is a mafia tactic to ensure the individual's loyalty is entirely to you since they know they would never have got the job they did on merit) and their primary skills lie in right wing TV and Podcasts. So these people prioritize effect and show for their followers, and are loyal to no one but Trump. And they've been selected primarily because they're incapable of doing the jobs they've been hired for well, so it's a stark 180 from the first term.
The key concept here is "transhumanism" [1]. This is a very popular belief among Silicon Valley CEOs. Followers have deluded themselves into thinking their genes are special and they think about what they can do to ensure this transhuman future. It usually means having as many children as possible a la Elon Musk.
Thing is, transhumanism is simply eugenics [2]. It's tech-flavored white supremacy [3].
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/silicon-valley-art...
[2]: https://www.seenandunseen.com/transhumanism-eugenics-digital...
[3]: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2023/01/19/transhumanism-...
They're seeking maximum asshole alignment and some recognize that while supporting the primary asshole may be causing them pain, it's lesser than the pain of the people they've always wanted to hurt.
The second biggest is a life that hasn't gone how they had envisioned and, rather than take accountability, they blame anything but their choices. Though, I think lack of accountability is a symptom of insecurity, so it is wrapped up in the first issue.
Meanwhile 28 of the 196 state parties to the world heritage convention have no sites listed at all. Of course, Taiwan has no sites at all.
It’s well known that many of the UN bodies and similar international orgs have been wholly captured by china or her new axis of evil. Ghebreyesus, for example, has been china’s man from the get-go. American dollars should not go to support a grand red chinese narrative.
UNESCO has, in recent years:
- published an “anti-racism toolkit”
- campaigned to “#ChangeMENtalities”, to “reshape masculinities for gender equality”
- published “comprehensive sexuality education” that is strongly at odds with many Americans views on how such things ought to be taught
- published ai ethics recommendations that focus on issues like “gender” and “climate”
- run partnerships to “get every learner climate-ready”
In other words, it’s operating out of its original scope, doing things that are clearly and massively one-sided. I recognize the NGO-industrial complex, along with much of mass media and culture, has been so wholly captured by the left for long enough that y’all can see a change back to the status quo as disruptive or odd. But the other half of the Overton window does still exist. A lot of what the current administration has done is stupid or wrong, but my tax dollars being sent to this organization would also be stupid and wrong.
UNESCO was previously a body that did some social justice stuff and a bunch of heritage work. Now it's a body that does a lot of social justice stuff and heritage work hijacked by chinese agitprop. The case for withdrawing previously was decent but these days it's pretty clear.
Coming up next: The United States wonders why it doesn't have allies anymore and why the rest of the world starts working around them.
I doubt this happens. The US keeps bullying other countries and those same countries keep looking up to the US as if it were a big friendly ally.
Since the US accounts for ~13%[0] of UNESCO funding, you're making GP's point for them. the US is giving up its seat at the table and UNESCO retains 87% of its funding.
[0] https://core.unesco.org/en/sources-of-funding
Like, if you wanted to make China look good on the international stage you'd be doing a lot of the stuff the current administration is doing.
It's very sad, tbh. Like the US gov have always been less good than they claimed, but they've just gone full dark side now (and in such an ineffective way, at least economically).
Throwing away our American First globalist capitalist ideological project for... clout?
Instead of recognizing injustice, it became an imposition of ideological points that have to be adopted wholesale instead of being evaluated independently.
There are valid positions on issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories but the method of promoting these ideas by enforcing group consensus is not valid and is anti-liberal.
Genuine intellectual curiosity is punished with what is basically name-calling. In result, there is a fear that leads people to publicly profess something unthinkingly or that they question only privately. This creates a culture of just parroting consensus views to avoid social penalties.
In a nutshell, it is pressure to conform.
> The United States Withdraws from UNESCO (state.gov)
Probably, the majority of people in the U.S. feel they are losing from these deals, which is why they are willing to withdraw. It is both the government’s prerogative and duty to manifest that will. As a non-American, I deeply respect that freedom and choice.
In fact, I believe that any administration has a duty to prioritize its own nation first—whether it's called "America First," "Palestinian First," "EU First," "China First," or any other national equivalent. This is a principle that every country should embrace. It's natural for governments to prioritize the interests of their own citizens, as they are funded by taxpayers and must be accountable to them.
And, To be "First", they need beneficial cooperation and compete wisely. Competition, driven by 'ego love,' along with cooperation, fueled by 'world love,' is the righteous way to "Make All Great Again."
These ideas are rooted in ecological and evolutionary principles. While "survival of the fittest" drives competition, it also paradoxically fosters the evolution of cooperation, as even the fittest depend on reciprocal relationships to truly thrive. <The Evolution of Cooperation> is a Book by Robert Axelrod