I'm just really puzzled by people frankly, one would expect Hacker News to be of higher caliber. Read the history, watch real geo-political analysis. But even without that, a presidents in who screams profanity on social media, threaten to take oil and resources of other countries and bomb to the dark ages..even without any political background, this a real low for any position let alone the president of the US.
I think Social Media truly brought the worse in people. People are not trying to be decent anymore.
To be honest, this forum is where I come to take th temperature of the US "centrists" who brought us to this point. I've quit other social media, so this is one of the few places where I can hear what folks (who are often quite clever in quite a few dimensions) spout rather vicious thoughts.
The other spot I get exposure to this part of the US political spectrum is the comment section of a youtube guy who is pretty far to the right but who has a seemingly (at least to me) well-informed understanding of the facts- he's interesting because it's kind of wild to hear the more lumpen version of this site and what their concerns are: they are really mad that this war is happening instead of further domestic crackdowns on immigration.
In both cases, it's helpful to understand where folks who have some pretty misinformed understandings of history and politics are sitting with their opinions.
It doesn't seem surprising to me that a bunch of aspiring venture capitalists, who have probably have been or are on the cusp of having a small taste of the massive wealth that their work in building out the surveillance state has brought to their masters, have totally shitty politics.
I think you are right, I've also stopped social media myself recently and left with nothing but YouTube and the occasional visit on HN for tech.
With that said, and I'm aware that HN audience are mostly in tech but I always thought we in tech are better trained to think critically and look at things from various perspectives. But to see the exact same response patterns one would see in FB makes one surely question how many people are truly capable of independent critical thinking. I'm also starting to think that given the complexity of modern life and the amount of information we are flooded with people are simply choosing the most repeated narrative within their circle without much reflection or any critical thinking. At the end of the day most folks here are busy with other things and it is easier to believe they are evil and we are liberating then dive deep into one of the most complicated areas when it comes to history and geopolitics.
Well, a lot of the folks here also share the view that because they understand how pointers work in C or can orchestrate stuff in docker (or whatever the kids do these days) they must be smarter than all us dumb losers who can't figure out how to make our brains okay with this world.
It's an appealing view, and I get it. Probably not a bad idea to question at length.
I keep getting downvoted and flagged, but there is noway anyone in good faith would support this war crime. A president who threaten to send a country to stone age, saying in front of everyones face that he wants to take the oil..
I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime, when we have on other hand, someone who is vocally saying that he is willing to destroy the country's infrastructure and steal their oil.
Well, sure I don't mind getting flagged or downvoted. But at least I speak my mind and what I believe is true.
This isn’t a contest for most just or most evil. Iran has committed horrible atrocities. The US’s approach to this war has been completely wrong and they are threatening war crimes.
Yeah but western powers have been threatening, bullying, murdering and undermining Iran and it's people since they nationalized their own damn oil three quarters of a century ago.
How do you expect an abused dog to turn out? It's probably not going to turn out very nice isn't it? The Iranian regime would chill out just fine on their own if only the west would stop being so cruel to them.
That's exactly it, and what's more they are kicking the abused dog even harder expecting submission. At this stage, it seems it would rather die or push the abuser away.
Iran has been "threatening, bullying, murdering and undermining" Israel since it was taken over by an irrational Shia theocracy. This war wouldn't be happening if Iran had behaved in a sane and rational manner over the last 35 years.
So one side is evil while the other side is just wrong ?
Like after 300k deaths in Irak when the administration said "sorry we have been misled by wrong information about the WMD"? They made a mistake, yet Iraqis were evil.
US armed rebels, that is their history, Israel wants to the current government down at all cost.
They did that with Iraq, ISIS, they trying with Kurdistan..
I'm not defending a theocracy, but this is not how countries are freed. And he is clearly claiming to take the oil, destroy their infrastructure and take the country to the dark ages. If Iranian government was saying that, hell would go lose.
Actually arming rebels is how countries are freed. Its not the only way but it is one of the most common. Also Iran arms rebels so whats your point in highlighting the US support for rebel groups?
Your perspective on who is being liberated and who is doing the liberating relies on a simplistic narrative. Ironically, the central figure of that narrative, Donald Trump, has openly stated that he does not mind seizing oil or returning the nation to the Dark Ages. Furthermore, they have backed armed protests and expressed a willingness to arm Kurdish factions.
I am uncertain about the logic or framework you are utilizing. If you believe such actions constitute "freeing" a country, then we clearly do not share the same moral and ethical standards.
I think you're assuming way to much from my comment. I was pushing back on the idea that arming rebel group isnt how countries are freed not supporting what Trump is doing.
A violent takeover may not immediately lead to a "free" country but it does open the doors to change and from that change can come freedom. Or in a different perspective its not freedom its just to be free from that certain regime.
because the person funding isnt doing it out of the good of their heart. They have interests in removing the current government. The rebels also have interests in removing the current government. That is all its just two people working together on a common goal its not that deep.
Iran has been saying this about Israel and the USA since 1979 and has been arming/propping up Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, who have has similar language on their flags/in their charters.
Keep in mind that we now know that US supplied the protestors weapons to wage violence during the crackdown that resulted in many police officers being killed. We also know that the US has run a campaign to turn protests into riots in past events. And we know that the US sponsors campaigns to create unrest in the country.
If Iran sucks, it is only because the US wants it to suck
The USA didn’t turn Iran into a terrorist Jihadist state attempting to get nukes. Not everything is the USA’s doing, give extremely violent Islam its fault as well.
Iran has funded/stood up Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi rebels whose flags and charters include maximalist jihadist rhetoric. Iran my entire life has pushed 'death to America'. When Iran's leadership was killed they talked about welcoming it and Islamic martyrdom. My entire life that is my exposure to what an Islamic state looks like. Sure seems jihadist to me.
The only thing those groups have in common is their hate for israel. And israel has intentionally made them the enemy. As it has done with Iran. And blackmailed trump to go after Iran.
At this point you simply just back away from all indications of “iran bad”
Wait, cites on the "US supplied Iranian protestors with weapons" bit? Other than Trump? It sounds ridiculous to question whether he's telling the truth, but here we are...
Are you suggesting I provide a citation for the President's claims? Beyond his reputation as a loose cannon, it is difficult to fathom why he would boast about such a thing.
From the beginning, the primary objective of this conflict has been for Israel to eliminate regional resistance, leaving Iran as the final holdout. By arming internal rebels to oppose the administration, external forces are essentially inciting a civil war to topple the government.
While the nation and its current leadership require reform, it is important to remember that these radical regimes do not emerge in a vacuum. Their perceived need to resist stems from external efforts to dismantle them. Such radicalization is often the direct consequence of aggressive policies, including economic sanctions, historical support for Saddam Hussein, and the installation of corrupt monarchies.
Every radical movement triggers a counter-movement, making it difficult to distinguish cause from effect. Much like the chills and fever associated with the flu, these movements represent an extreme but instinctive immune response to an outside threat.
> I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime,
Well mainly by having Iranian friends who tell us their government is an evil regime, and when we try to insist our government is evil too, lecture us about our privilege to show they really mean it.
youre only getting downvoted because they pay people good money to make sure their ridiculous narrative gets front page every single day. us murders a countries leader and a bunch of school kids and suddenly iran is accused of murdering 100k protesters and committing war crimes... like wtf lol
> I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime
Iran mass murdered tens of thousands of protesters in one day. I was outraged when Trump’s goons murdered two Minnesotan protesters—if we can agree this is evil, it should follow that a regime that murders tens of thousands of protesters is also evil. This isn’t complicated, which is why you’re being downvoted (I did not downvote you).
Neither the precise scale of the killings or the degree of militancy of the protesters has been well documented. It's reported that a lot of policemen and revolutionary guard soldiers were killed too.
Remember, Mossad publicly boasted that they were on the ground with the protesters, which was a pretty insane thing to do and basically gave Iran carte blanche to say these aren't protests, it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt. There's very little we can say to that when Mossad basically publicly said it was.
Maybe they were so sure the protests would succeed they figured it would earn them/justify goodwill with the new government?
FWIW, my information comes from Iranians who speak regularly with their families who still live in the cities where these killings happened. They talk about protestors pushed into a market place by IRGC with just one exit—the market was set on fire and anyone who fled out the exit was shot by IRGC.
Also, if you know anything at all about the history of the Iranian regime, it’s entirely unsurprising that this happened. They respond murderously to every large scale protest, and have been mass murderers since they turned on the leftists and other allies who helped install them in ‘79.
> it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt
This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally. I’m not defending Israel, but these were innocent unarmed people protesting even if Israel played a role in organizing the protests. I detest the Israeli regime as well, but justifying either side’s mass murder is insane.
Man, if you've followed Iran, you'll know that some exile Iranians are a bit like exile Cubans. Like the latter, they have plenty of legitimate things to be angry about, but that doesn't mean they aren't, a good deal of them, batshit crazy. Lots of them support the son of the CIA-supported dictator who was so bad he landed Iran with their theocrats in the first place. Some of them are supporters of MEK, a goddamn case study in political cults.
> This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally
Yes, but that doesn't mean they're not right. US and particularly Israel outright took credit for it, to a degree you'd be hard pressed to find any time in history. It wasn't just a spontaneous uprising, it was also very openly a foreign sponsored regime change operation.
Which doesn't mean they're aren't a lot of innocent people who have wanted to get rid of the theocrats all along getting murdered. I'm sure there are.
There are just enough in the opposition who have decided to ally with Israel (which would rather see Iran a Somalia-style failed state before a free and democratic Iran) and the dictator's sonthat any kind of moral legitimacy the movement could have had is out the window.
There's a lot of incorrect information here, but I prefer not to veer farther from our core disagreement by litigating details that seem tertiary (though I'm happy to discuss them in another thread or after we've resolved our core disagreement--it's an interesting topic).
You were originally arguing that the Islamic Republic isn't evil because the protestors deserved to be killed because Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests. I don't see how you're getting from "Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests" to "therefore Iran's mass murder was legitimate". Even if the tens of thousands figure is exaggerated by an order of magnitude, it would still make the Islamic Republic an evil regime. Even if Iranians who criticize the regime are "batshit crazy", even if the US and Israel organized the protests, even if the Shah was really worse than the Islamic Republic, none of that justifies murdering unarmed protestors by the thousands. My position is that mass murder is wrong even if the protestors held opinions I disagreed with.
if the number of tens of thousands dead is true (and i'm highly skeptical, but let's go with that) then it correlates with the number of starlink terminals smuggled into sanctioned iran way before the protests. both us and israeli officials publicly boasted of mossad agents being on the ground (presumably coordinating these people exerting brutal violence; incidentally, these terminals were the reason for shutting down internet) and even bessant boasted about manipulating the currency into collapse to spark the unrests in the first place. that's all quite evil.
now, i'm against death penalty, but if a government under siege by foreign powers faces such an existential threat then that's one outcome to be expected ... those agitators had it coming. many innocent people died that day, but surely the majority weren't that innocent.
one can disagree with or dislike the irg, but i don't think they're evil, and if they are by the same criteria the us and israel are fucking monsters.
I would be entirely unsurprised if the US and Israel didn’t play a role in agitating, but the Iranian people genuinely don’t like their government. You can talk to pretty much any Iranian expat in any country. The protests may have been coordinated by Israel, but the people who died were ordinary citizens who want to live in a free country. The protestors absolutely were innocent by any reasonable definition. Protesting an oppressive government isn’t a moral offense.
> one can disagree with or dislike the irg, but i don't think they're evil, and if they are by the same criteria the us and israel are fucking monsters.
Yes, multiple governments can be bad, which is what this thread has been debating. Israel coordinating protests does not absolve IRGC butchering unarmed protestors. Iran sponsoring Hamas terrorism does not absolve Israel’s brutality against civilians. This isn’t complicated.
But as Trump has assured us, that’s the old regime which is completely different from the current regime, which as Trump again has assured us, is not anywhere near as crazy as the old regime.
/s
The Iranian regime is incredibly evil. That makes the American actions even more evil given that they’re providing that evil regime so much cover and allowed it to transition from their 86 year old leader with almost no opportunity for opposition.
So the country waging wars from the sky, threatening to take their oil, annexing Greenland, suffocating Cuba, the only country who used nuclear bombs twice...is what?
And anyone who knows a bit of history in the region they will understand that this is the case. They armed Saddam to fight Iran for 8 years. The main issue with Iran is that it is against Israel.
It feels like a lot of people on this thread believe that Iran can’t be bad because other countries have done bad things. This seems obviously absurd, but so many of the comments here take the form, “Iran isn’t bad, look at what the US has done”. Come on.
Gemini said
The point isn't that one side is "good." The point is that your binary notion of bad and good is far too simplistic for this reality. We are talking about nuclear powers threatening to send a country of 90 million people to the dark ages just to seize their oil and resources. Radicalism is not born in a vacuum; it is an extreme yet necessary immune reaction to an invader. When you are facing a genocide level threat, the moral calculus is not actually that hard. If you can't see the difference between internal policy flaws and a superpower threatening total destruction, then you aren't being objective. You are just taking a side with the party holding the bigger hammer.
You're making an obvious straw man argument. Acknowledging that the Islamic Republic is evil does not imply a moral comparison between them and the United States or Israel. There's no contradiction between opposing the US and Israel for starting this war and acknowledging that the Islamic Republic is an evil regime. That's the point of this entire thread: more than one group can be evil, and the Islamic Republic does not cease to be evil regardless of one's opinion about the US and Israel. These are not dependent variables. You are endorsing an obviously false dichotomy.
Why do you think no one cares? My feeds are outraged. Maybe some normies can’t keep up with all the specific heinous stuff coming out of this administration, but I don’t think they’re happy about it.
Saying things is not a war crime. So if Iranian soldiers surrendered to US soldiers and they were shot that would be a war crime. I don't think that happened? Hegseth statements could be used to support the claim of war crime under such circumstances if they were to arise. [EDIT: As a commenter suggests it is possible that simply saying this is a war crime, or at least there are some legal opinions suggesting it]
Attacking civilian targets with cluster bombs has happened and Iran is doing that as we speak. That is a war crime.
Attacking infrastructure is not a war crime if that infrastructure serves a military purpose. Attacking purely civilian use infrastructure is a war crime.
Threatening to attack civilian use infrastructure is not a war crime. Threatening to attack infrastructure used for military purposes is also not a war crime.
Mowing down protestors with machines guns is not a war crime but maybe we should consider it a crime against humanity.
EDIT: FWIW I do care about what Hegseth said. It's wrong and he shouldn't have said that. But people say stuff- what matters are the actions.
There are some actual acts that count as war crimes as well, that Hegsdeth has overseen - killing civilians off the coast of venesuela by attacking and sinking fishing boats, but also then killing the civilians after theyve jumped ship.
then in the iran conflict, leaving the sailors to drown after sinking iran's show boat with a sub
The US should do better. But we got here when the parent said:
> I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime,
Iran's government mows down protestors by the 10's of thousands. They beat woman to death for violating the dress code. They conduct public hangings in stadiums. They routinely use torture and arbitrary arrests. They and their proxies bombard civilians routinely. They recruit child soldiers. The list is just endless. How is that even comparable to the US government?
I know this double tap terminology is frequently used in social media these days (IMO it's propaganda). I don't know there is solid evidence of targeting first responders intentionally. I haven't seen it.
I did see some mention that the school was hit twice but I don't think that's supported by the satellite imagery or videos we've seen. In theory US service personnel can and should refuse to execute an order that is targeting first responders and my base assumption would be that the US does not practice this. There are huge number of people involved in planning strikes and executing them so you'd think some of those people would refuse such an order and/or speak about it publicly. I.e. I don't believe the US initial salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles and bombings were designed to intentionally hit first responders. Beyond it being a war crime it also makes no sense to "waste" bombs and cruise missiles on first responders when presumably there are a lot of other more valuable targets; beyond it being morally wrong and a war crime it's also stupid. The only time I've seen this sort of strategy being executed intentionally is during the suicide bombing campaign in Israel. e.g.:
In the context of terrorizing a population it makes perfect sense. In the context of the US attack on Iran it makes zero sense since it doesn't serve the US interest to terrorize the population of Iran and the regime couldn't care less.
What do you want me to say about the US? I would like to see zero war crimes from the US. I would like to see a US president that doesn't sound like a mad person on social media and a SecDef that isn't a religious zealot. I still think that big picture there is no comparing the US to Iran in terms of the actions each is taking and has taken. Iran fundamentally wants to make the world a worse place and the US wants to make it a better place (and sure, make a lot of money while doing that...). Would a solution that doesn't involve dropping bombs be better? Sure. Find me one.
The confusion comes from the fact that the regime which is very clearly better for its own people is also the one which actions are clearly awful for the rest of the world (if only because it has vastly larger means).
It's not confirmed but I agree it was very likely a US strike. An accidental one.
Assuming the US did not intend to kill school girls that is also not a war crime. You can certainly argue that this happened due to the US decision to go to war and claim the actions to not be moral (or illegal as some have stated). Others might argue that more harm would occur if no action was taken and that the action minimizes the overall harm (e.g. to the Iranian people or others).
You could also argue that attack was intentional. I don't think there's any evidence of that and I'm not sure what purpose it served if it was one.
It is difficult to extract the real purpose of most things about this war, if you're in the US, since almost every single part of it seems against the US' interests and public face.
You're probably technically correct and that the US didn't intentionally look in Google Maps for an elementary school and decided to destroy it. But did we really need to Double Tap it?
That tweet by Timothy Snyder is quite ridiculous. There's just no way that's the motivation behind all this.
Unfortunately it's also the only motivation anyone has presented that there is any real hope of actually achieving. And it's the kind of excuse trump could use to become glorious dictator. Or at least I wouldn't be surprised to learn he thinks it is.
No, I really don't think that's why this war was started. I don't think trump actually wants terrorist attacks in America. But it just might be what he will get, whether he likes it or not.
> I don't think trump actually wants terrorist attacks in America.
He might not but he's surrounded by christian evangelist lunatics who think bringing about the end times is their moral responsibility and, more importantly, they are in charge because Trump is an addled idiot who has fewer thoughts in his head than an orange cat.
US president, holding nukes and saying things like "whole civilization will die tonight" is just state terrorism of the worst kind, ... so far, yes. It may become a war crime of genocide. Not sure why should I or anyone wait and see, before issuing sweeping comments about all of america, which made this possible, by working hard to building up the military capable of doing it and giving power to nutjob issuing the threats.
Be sure that this US threat is not just against Iran, it's a US threat aginst the entire world, and it will be taken as such by many, you war crime justifying tool.
Also pretty telling, that you're using intl. law to justify US attacks, instead of using it for what their purpose was,... which is to limit the ways in which states execute war. The same thing Israel was doing to justify murdering 20 000 children in Gaza, just constantly finding "loopholes" and using it retroactively to justify every single thing they did that someone contensted.
The western analyst and thinkers don't yet understand what is the story the makes this current governance stand.
You can't understand something when your mental model doesn't have the depth for it it.
The author still thinks people are rallying around the flag when the country being attacked has a thousand years of narrative about the oppression and the oppressed.
It goes to show the author doesn't understand what is happening and this is all just..in hindsight.
At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.
If you think about, we moved human one-on-one battles to MMA and combat sport, this allowed channeling individual human aggression in a controlled environment. The future war might be not very different, swarm of drones fighting other swarm of drones while others watching on the news, who can build, manage and deploy smarter and more effective drones. If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.
We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable.
So it is NOT like before. And the logical conclusion, as those drones get better and more widely adopted, is that war will be nothing more a video game with real economics and supply chain. So we basically made the cost of genocide or colonization too high to absorb. Previous wars, people got away with it.
The majority of nations? majority of people on earth? We are going to a multilateral world and to win a war you need secure the appeal of majority. If the majority think your war is illegal they can cut you off from the world economy.
It is a distributed consensus-based algorithm, and the young people who are writing those algorithms will shape the future of governance.
You are arguing today. This is the first kind of wars we are seeing of this nature.
But Iran is hitting exactly where it hurts, global supply chain, and now the US will be pressured by the global economy to either retreat or commit a genocide.
And if all the war was drones and anti-drones today (which is not) we would have saved many lives. Look at UAE/Iran, UAE lost no live despite being hammered with drones/missiles, this is an example of drones/anti-drones future. The reason why we don't have this with the US, is because the US needs a defeat for the legacy system to die, and it seems they will get that defeat soon. Actually they are already defeated, Trump said he is retreating in 3 weeks while achieving nothing but destruction.
Your casual usage of the word “genocide” doesn’t apply to Iran.
Iranians are dramatically in favor of removing the theocratic Islamic regime. Iranian expats the world over celebrated Khamenei’s death.
My Iranian mother-in-law living in Tehran has literally been saying “get the mullahs out” every time we’ve spoken for the last year. Millions of Iranians inside Iran are thankful that the US (and even Israel despite the complicated relationship) is attacking the regime.
This is a regime, after all, that killed thousands of its own people. That requires girls to fully cover themselves. That doesn’t allow singing or dancing in the street.
Achieved nothing? Go talk to a real Iranian, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Iranians the world over have felt hope for the first time in over 40 years that they may get their country back. And we absolutely should not stop trying to help them.
Yeah, I grew up in Iraq, under more ruthless dictator that fought Iran. You are naive if you thank Israel/US are here to free Iran.
A government won't last that long if there were to genuine supports. The fact you are outside of Iran and have some people there, doesn't make you more knowledgeable, it makes you westernized and you voted to leave with your own feet.
From my conversations, Iranians don’t really care if Israel/US are specifically there to “free Iran”. Iranians are pragmatic, they understand that US/Israel have their own motives.
As long as the regime is being destroyed, that’s a win. And that’s happening, big time. That’s why Iranians danced in the street when Khamenei was killed.
What this had to with with my arguments regarding the nature of future warfare, the emerging world economical order?
There is no point in history where we had such connected economies and this kind of autonomous war technology. All previous wars were fought by human bodies. We are witnessing the first generation of wars that becoming completely autonomous.
Where is the assumptions? it is not just world. It is a world ruled by constrains and for better or worse human nature.
There is no people involved at all, in fact my argument is that there will be no people involved in wars..I'm just extrapolating on the what we are seeing today. Also nobody really understands reality fully not predict the future. We are just speculating here on what might happen. You surely don't understand reality and you said you can't imagine anything else.
Alright, so in your mind the world and future war will stay the same, regardless of drones, robotics and AI. Frankly, I don't understand what your argument is other than saying fantasy and doesn't match the reality that somehow you know more.
Of course the goal of the war is to make others to submit by force and pain. That's obvious
But you missing my point.
If in the near future multilateral system, governed by AI, drones and robotics. A war is nothing more than a war of attrition between economies, then in a global interconnected economy with scarce energy, it will become an absurd proposition because one nation can't cause significant bleed in other without bleeding itself.
Without human involvement and other players forces energy leakage in the global economy, it's not hard to see how. In fact we are seeing right now. It's why Trump is pulling back.
"Trump started the war to distract everyone" that is your opinion.
The war in middle east will not end soon, I agree with that. The question is whether the US will stay or not and how it will be rearranged. Trump is telling people he is will end it soon, but he will leave troops there. But the issue is Iran will keep hunting the economy, and he is now throwing the problem at the European. But what what will the European do? They have no option but to listen to Iran, and what does Iran want? end of the US bases to the region. So basically the US will retreat.
But with regards to the nature of the war itself. It is turning to drone vs drone wars, it is happens as we speak, and this is the first two wars of this scale we witnessing. I'm not sure why you think it is not happening? this is exactly what is happening. And the only reason why Iran is able to pull this off is because of the drones and guided missiles which is allowing them to bleed the globe economically, and an interconnected world, an AI driven speedboat hits a tankers near the shore of Iran, causes the tomato prices to raise at grocery store in California. And people will say, this has always been the case with war, and my argument is that we never had that level of interconnectedness before, we seen weapons that be produced cheaply at scale and can keep inflicting pressure on the other side and we have never lived in a multilateral global world order before. This is truly a new era in human history.
It is interesting that people give downvoting, so either they enjoy having the current wars continue and people physically killed, or they basically gave up on seeing a better future.
Ukrainian invasion was attempt at genocide and colonization. Israel did anoyher genocide last year. And then there is yemen which may not be genocide, I dunno, but has super high unchecked amount of victims. Saudi made sure no one is watching.
But my argument is for the future that we are starting to get a glimpses of. I'm not negating the currently genocides, I'm hoping for a future in which we don't have war at all due to the absurdly of it. And I'm arguing that there is a path forward and it is very realistic.
You missed my point, please read my other comments.
You either agree or disagree with the idea of genocide. And if you disagree with idea of genocide, then this is becoming closer to video games as more drones are deployed which is my thesis. But if you agree with the idea of genocide, then yes, wars can be won by total elimination (or major reduction) in the other people's population and loss of life.
So do you think genocide is acceptable in war or not?
Well, because they reject the idea of making a war a physical video games of drones, therefore, they would be advocating keeping the current system?
My point was that we are better off with abstracting away the war, so if you downvote that idea, then you want to keep the current system, and to win a war in the current system you need total surrender, which comes at a huge cost of life.
No, I downvoted your idea that somehow we "don't allow" genocide and yet Israel killed over 20k children in Gaza and literally nothing happened to anyone as a result - the downvote is on the blatantly untrue assumption that doesn't seem to relate to the real world at all.
I still don't understand why you think this implies that I support genocide, when the exact opposite is true?
You didn't understand my point. I said in the future (not now) the world might trend to having wars similar to those of playing video games. And I said this might be better because we just give politicians another medium for conflict resolution.
But you downvoted the idea, so you either don't like it or didn't understand. I assumed you understood it, but it seems you didn't
But that is what is happening now. Drones vs anti-drones, what happens when robots comes online? robots vs robots..and people/AI at the command centre managing war from a UI that looks like star craft.
>>We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable.
I downvoted because I don't find this quoted sentence true, realistic or even remotely plausible. I will repeat for the 4th time now that I don't understand why you seem to think that downvoting you means supporting genocide - you seem to be very fixated on that idea.
>>But you downvoted the idea
I did not - I thought I made it clear in my last comment.
Regardless of whether or not anyone does or doesn't understand your point or position, you're being very obtuse about this.
There are many other possible scenarios that could play out, and disagreeing with the idea that "wars will turn into video games" doesn't mean someone is in favor of genocide.
That is how children argue; please hold yourself to a higher standard.
Also, if you put obviously incorrect information in the same comment (which you absolutely did), you should expect to be downvoted.
I think people are downvoting you because your post displays extreme disconnection from reality.
I will believe that it is possible to “fix” war immediately after we “fix” poverty, extreme inequality, hunger, deaths of despair, and crime, any of which should be immensely easier to solve than war.
This speculation in the future if this technology keeps being adopted and the world would have multiple strong players.
Would you rather keep the current system? how do you really think the war in Iran or Ukraine would end? It won't end until one side is completely destroyed, that is why it is called wars of attrition. But war of attrition means what when each side is using commercialized cheaply produced intelligent drones?
What system I would rather have is irrelevant. What system you would rather have is irrelevant. The system that we have, and the systems we will have in the future, are emergent properties of human nature mixed with economic reality (energy/resource availability vs regional economic needs). Voting will not change it, nor will revolution.
You’re welcome to try, but I will no longer waste my time on it. I have studied it for years and I don’t believe it can be changed short of an energy revolution (fusion).
Edit: actually, even if we get fusion, the AI boom has shown that our energy use will automatically expand to consume all economically available energy and resources. So even that would likely not solve the issue.
Regarding your commend on energy, I think it is actually an argument on my point that fighting wars is going to be even more absurd. If the world is running short of energy then fighting a war that further consumes energy without clear win will be viewed as absurd. If all wars will become a war of attrition between robots and economies, then fighting wars means no energy left for local economies to run across the globe. The future war will feel like bleeding, a leak in an already scarce system, you don't do water guns fight int the middle of the desert.
Yes, you are correct about the effects, much as the Sea Peoples destroyed multiple civilizations at the end of the Bronze Age and lowered the world’s overall level of development. Or how the Mongol conquests destroyed Mesopotamian irrigation networks and early organized Chinese societies. Or the Thirty Years’ War that devastated European civilizations.
World Wars I and II would have had similar effects if it weren’t for rapid global technological advancement and industrialization at this time, which enabled more rapid recovery. Much of the cheapest energy has been extracted by now, so the next serious global war will reduce global carrying capacity. With all that entails.
You don't think the absurdity of drone vs drone economic warfare coupled with the reduction in global energy will reduce the probability of future wars?
I actually think it will.
Because in the examples you gave, the world was not as connected. But look at what happening now, an economic bleed in one nation is impact the global economy in way that nobody even understands let alone predicts. You wage a war in Iran? alright, few weeks later people in Brazil can't have food because of shortage in fertilizer..US farmers increase prices by 40% because of the shortage, that causes riots in the US..we live in an extremely interconnected word and nothing short of a third global war would tear that system down.
We had nothing like this in the past, not the tech, nor the economies and the information system, that allows us to see what is happening.
The argument you are making is that it happened in the past with all these semi isolated empires therefore it would happen again. But the world we live is vastly different from the past. And I don't think your assertion hold into the future frankly, it is poorly defended.
If you understood history well, you would know that the Bronze Age collapse was actually very similar to what is happening today. Bronze Age empires relied on the tin supply chain, with much of it produced in Afghanistan. The tin trade was enormous and profitable for all involved, but a series of constant disruptions caused the supply chain to break down, ending economical bronze production. The crisis was initiated by natural disasters and climate change, while The Sea Peoples, internal civil conflicts, and the dawn of chariot warfare were the final straws that unraveled the trade networks. The rulers of the various Bronze Age civilizations were in communication and were aware of what was happening, but they were unable to coordinate to stop it.
You have too much confidence in people’s ability to identify a crisis across cultures and coordinate a collective response while accepting the often unequal costs that such a response would impose.
I think we reached the end of your arguments because we are repeating.
As I said, I don't think this is the same as the past, not even close. You can't assume the same results from a very different preconditions, yet you keep doing this.
The second point, you don't need to see far to understand, especially after this war with Iran, that the world economy is one organism, and you can't shoot the feet and hope to run happily by the other.
It doesn’t matter that it is one organism, there are those who benefit from this arrangement and those who do not. Those who do not would often prefer to tear it down even at the cost of their own lives. This is human nature and cannot be changed.
The increasing complexity of the supply chain comes with extreme fragility, and a series of cascading shocks could unravel it as in the Bronze Age. Over a sufficient time frame this is almost certain to occur.
Regardless, I agree that we are done, I understand your perspective as I once believed as you do. Good luck, and hopefully you are correct, for everyone’s sake.
I don't want to appear argumentative but it ironic that you said that you once believe as I do, because I also once believed as you do.
What changed my mind is technology and not human nature.
1) Advancement in AI/Robotics/Drones that enabled asymmetric warfare
2) And this is the point that I don't think you are seeing, is that I don't think the future governance will actually be done by humans. Maybe "older" folks here would think it is fantasy/sci-fi, but I think as AI improve, the world gets more complex, and human brain show more limitation nations will gradually opt to using AI to make key decisions. Eventually, I think the entire economy will be managed by some sort of AI or a network of AIs. And I think it is the new generation that will be building those systems, the ones currently growing with AI.
I don't think you thought about that, because your point is that human nature is flawed, which I agree with, given that we are chimps with bigger brains. But that slight brain advantage gave us better technologies, and it seems to me it would either be the thing that completely destroy us or govern us to a better future (one would hope). The last point I want to add, humanity has walking on a very thin rope, and I think if we see a path forward, regardless of how narrow, we should aim for it. You keep your eyes on the rope when you know you can easily fall..and you certainly do not look back.
That assumes that war will "evolve" into drone vs. drone. I don't think it will. Sure, drones will be used more and more, but there will always be people involved, even if they are "merely" civilians who get caught in the crossfire.
Most wars aren't fought in completely uninhabited areas. Drones will always have people to kill, and their controllers will always aim them at people.
You can't assume what you want, the facts on the ground are clear, we are moving to drones, AI, robots. And the nations who don't move that direction will not have a chance to fight any war due to the asymmetry in the cost. It would be like fighting guns with arrows.
Regarding the second point, UAE had 2400 projectiles on them with 10 causalities. This is a war of economies, not aim for people. So your second point doesn't also hold on the ground given the current systems let alone the system 50 years from now.
I actually have zero believe in the rationality of the leaders, you only need to listen to one speech to see the irrationality.
However, systems don't care about people irrationality, it will force them to behave in certain ways. We are seeing things unfold in front of our eyes clearly pertaining to the global energy.
Iran blocked the world supply forcing the global empire to retreat, it does't matter what Trump wants, at the end of the day, he is left with a dichotomy, either to escalate and further risk the global economy or retreat, and he had no option but to choose the later. He understood that destroying the world economy will be the end of his presidency and legacy.
If the future is merely a war of economies and drones, my point is that it would be closer to a video games than wars of the past. And this is a good thing!
I understand your pessimism, but with all due respect, your argument is weak.
I didn't say our preferences, voting, or opinions will change the system. I believe the system is being reshaped by new technology and a shifting world order—specifically AI, robotics, drone warfare, and a multilateral global structure. We are currently witnessing the first iteration of this kind of conflict: the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
Think about it: Iran launched 2,400 projectiles at the UAE—a country of only 83,600 sq km—and caused only 10 casualties. Fifty years ago, if you had launched that many, you would have destroyed the entire country. Why the difference? Because it is literally robots fighting robots.
The reality is that these drones, missiles, and anti-missile systems require a global supply chain. To produce them, you need access to intelligence, GPS components, microprocessors, piston engines, aluminium, and more. No single country possesses all of these resources; in a war of attrition, if your supply chain is cut, you have already lost.
In a few years, we will see mass-produced robots and drones that are even more intelligent, all powered by AI. You can study the entirety of human history and you won't find any precedent for what is coming. The best analogy I can think of is a video game.
Do you have a good suggestion for how to get the next superpower to agree to that kind of thing? I think the most likely outcome is that their allies will be allowed to do genocides where they want, and boycotts and blockades will only work on their enemies, probably.
I think will it will emerge as we get into multilateral world order. Given that those drones depends on global supply chains, satellite images, natural resources across the world, we could imagine that a in multilateral world, if the bigger players decide to pull the plug on the economic supply and/or supply drones themselves, the war is over for the smaller players. Therefore, we either have a global war or a mechanism of conflict resolution that we never seen before or we only saw in sci-fi movies and video games.
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively
This has been the assumption for over a decade now.
> those who can't produce any more drones, lose
Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1].
> If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat
This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature.
The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals.
Yes, but what you are missing the cost of total elimination of the other side.
For example, in Iraq, Saddam was able to use chemical weapons and wipe out the resistance, this is no longer an accepted solution by majority of people on earth.
So there is no real way to actually win a war. If you can't kill or enslave the other population, and the world is not accepting refugees, if you hit one economy completely you might the global economy. So what do you do? there is actually no real way to win a war as those constraints become strong and stronger. You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down and hope they would resign, by better co-ordinating your drones and managing your economy, which is a video game in the real world.
> You are left with the only option of nulling the other's economy down
How do you (detest this phrasing, it very glib) null the other side?
Most weapon systems aren't developed in entirely separate supply chains - they use off-the-shelf components that are available for commercial usecases as well.
To successfully take out an opponents operational capacity when they are using dual use technology means the barrier between "civilian" and "military" is nonexistent.
It basically means the return to total war doctrine.
My point is that this assertion is wrong - "they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat".
It is predicated on the assumption that the new (but in reality old) iteration of war would lead to less civilian casualties.
How is it really old when we have completely new AI/Robotics enabled warfare that would allow nations in the not distance future (not today) to engage in a war without human involvement? We never had anything like this before?
How would a war like this look like? what does winning really mean? and if your entire drone army depends on a global economy of suppliers, then you can easily cut off.
How is it that old? we never had wars like this..sorry, this is very stupid argument.
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.
This has always been the case.
It's very common for a war to be lost by the side that runs out of resources first -- whether soldiers, oil, missiles, or whatever the limiting factor is. Right now a major question in the Iran war is how many drones and missiles Iran has left.
What you describe as "playing strategy video game and call it day" is essentially democracy, and why democracies generally don't declare war on each other. Mostly, they trade goods and play football (soccer) against each other instead.
You are missing the point again. That has not always been case.
Read my other comments why it's the same. But basically with AI/Drones + Global Interconnected Economy + Multilateral world order + Global Information = new system.
We never had anything like that, and the argument that this has always been the case is missing my point entirely. But if you don't get, well, you won't get it.
"Again"? When did I miss the "point" the first time?
I don't get it because you haven't explained what is different now. Writing out some equation isn't an explanation. If you don't explain something clearly, and then try to blame people for not understanding, you're not going to have a good time.
You're proposing that wars being decided based on who runs out of resources first is something new. I'm telling you, this has been a major factor in warfare for millenia.
Orignal Star Trek did an episode on this - "A Taste of Armageddon". The war was a video game - fought on a computer. But if the virtual bombs hit your area, you were declared dead and had to a report to a disintegration chamber. If you can get past the dated special effects - the concept is the same.
This is like the future after the scenario I describe happens. But I diff, is that we keep the game, but change the medium. Humans are war oriented by nature, like chimps, but I think as the world becomes more connected, the cost of destroying one place is causing impact on other..yet there is a desire to resolve conflict in violent way.
6 weeks equates 84 average sized US highschools worth of people dying on the Russian side and twice as many coming back with life altering injuries. I'm not sure how a country can survive that.
It seems to me that the Russian attitude is that life is a cruel joke, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The country has had terrible government and an oppressed population for hundreds of years. Russian influence operations are using their intimate knowledge of destructive attitudes to drag down the competition to their level.
The difference is you can appeal or ignore a game result. If Ukraine lost a strategy game tournament, would they give up their territory? Or fight to hold it still?
Vladimir Putin doesn't dare to indirectly strike through Iran at the sources of fire power production powering suicide drones and targeteering data at Russia. He is too weak.
Unfortunately, diplomatic conflict resolution is prone to failures and the cost of failure is really really high.
What Iran is doing is telling the empire that their war has a cost on their economy and reputation. And the only reason they are able to do so is because of drones/missiles (basically automated Kamikaze pilots) and I would also argue GenAI since they producing a lot of PR videos which used be expensive to make. If Iran had to fight the war with their people, US would have won due to the imbalance of destructive power.
In other words, we are witnessing a new kind of system for conflict resolution. Not war and not diplomacy. More of drones/AI/robotics systems hitting economies while trying to avoid human life losses in order to win the narrative war. This no where similar to any war of the past. The key change is waging wars without people, i.e the automation of warfare. Which is closer to a video game than traditional wars.
But people think of my statement as reductionist to the current causalities, which is not my point, obviously we are far from having fully automated warfare but we are seeing the first generation. The closest example is the fight between Iran/UAE basically a network of digital systems defending against another.
And if my reasoning hold, we might end up in a more peaceful earth.
Yes exactly. Like an arm wrestle, those who can demonstrate they have the better swarms, better AI, better supply chain, better innovation, win the war. And the other nation surrender. There is for resolving extreme national conflicts. If one side decides to go further and use drones to commit a genocide or completely destroy the other side economy/resources. Then other major players will join the game by using more drones and overwhelm the aggressive nation production and end it.
> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
> Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
But then how will you gain new territory for oligarchs and billionaires? Are you really ready for the sacrifice that their next yacht will be smaller instead of larger? Do you really want them to withdraw from London's real estate market?
Is this for real? stupid humans, stupid decision now blaming the new kid in the blog..an arrogant hubris president, and the department of war, and corrupt Israeli lobby with a PM that wants to destroy a country of 90 million people...then they blame AI?
honestly the most interesting thing about ARC-AGI-3 isn't the 0.25% scores everyone is doomposting about. it's the Duke harness result.
if you give Opus just three generic tools (READ, GREP, BASH with Python) and literally zero game-specific help, it completes all three preview games in 1,069 actions. for comparison, humans do it in like ~900. that's actually insane. it writes its own BFS, builds a grid parser from scratch, and even solves a Lights Out puzzle with Gaussian elimination. all on its own.
i really think the benchmark is testing two different things and just smashing them together. can the model reason about novel interactive environments? yeah, clearly it can. can it do spatial reasoning over a 64x64 grid from raw JSON with zero tools? no. but then again, neither can a human if you ripped out their visual cortex lol.
humans come "pre-installed" with specialized subsystems for this exact stuff: a visual cortex for spatial perception, a hippocampus for persistent memory, etc. these aren't "tools" in Chollet's framing but they're basically identical to what the Duke harness provides. the model is just building its own version of those (Python for the cortex, grep for memory). it just needs the permission to build them.
the real gap the Duke team found isn't perception or memory anyway, it is hypothesis quality. some runs solve vc33 in 441 actions, others just plateau past 1,500. the variance is just down to whether the model commits early to the right explanation of how the game works. that's a way more interesting and targetable finding than just saying "frontier models score below 1%."
Chollet is probably right philsophically that AGI should handle any input format without help. but reporting 0.25% when the actual reasoning gap is in hypothesis formation (not spatial perception) makes the benchmark a way worse progress indicator than it could be imo.
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