If I were President, and I were meeting with an enemy face to face, and they saluted me, I’d salute them back.

I have not served in any military and am not aware of the official meaning of a salute.

But I have had enemies and if I were meeting with one of my enemies and they saluted me, I would salute them.

This is just based on my gut feel of the gesture’s meaning from watching movies. My gut feel is it’s a combination of:

• This handshake indicates we’re both listening intently and ready to talk
• I see you. We are the same despite our ranks, because we’ve both put ourselves here, and because we’re both equally susceptible to bullets.

I could be wrong, and I’m asking for correction if I am, but based on that I’d salute an enemy soldier if he was standing there ready to meet with me.

Thing is though, with a politician it’s different. I don’t know if Trump’s ever been shot at. Probably not. So the “hello, spiritual brother” thing that can apply to any other soldier even enemy is less there with a politician.

I don’t know. Just saying it seems natural to me to salute an enemy. Like “this sucks, maybe we can end it today” feeling to it for me. Framing the war as a problem they’re facing together.

It’s the hat that did it.

We (US) could run the program from our embassy. Unsure how we’d help them get money though. Can the US embassy in SK permit people to work for US companies or something, to open up a portion of the market for these people to legally work?

I guess I’m not so clear on what portion of their fucked status is coming from law, what’s coming from culture, and what’s just the desperation of total poverty as a result of arriving with nothing.

Is it difficult because airlines and whatnot won’t carry them, or because the receiving country won’t let them immigrate due to being “stateless”?

Are they stateless in a way someone coming from Bolivia to the US isn’t, because NK’s outside of some globally-recognized state system? I’ve never considered this before.

We need to get a lot better about this kind of thing now that the cost of generating fake but structurally believable content/information has dropped.

Web of trust has always seemed like it’s for geeks so far. We need to enter a new phase of our cultural history, where competent knowledge of cryptographic games is commonplace.

Either that, or the geeks need to figure a way to preserve civilization link monks in the dark ages, trading accurate science and news among their tiny networks, while the majority of insecure networks are awash in AI-generated psyops/propaganda/scamspeak.

Or, we might get lucky and AI are inherently more ethical as they get more intelligent, as a rule of nature or something.

It’s nice to imagine speech, in general, being a natural environment the human brain is evolutionarily adapted to. And speech among other humans is an environment we’re adapted to. We implicitly assume certain limitations in people’s ability to spin bullshit while keeping it error-free, for instance, so we have an instinct to trust more as we hear more of what a person is saying. We trust longer stories more, and we trust people the longer we know them.

But AI, even if it’s not fundamentally different than humans - ie even if it’s still bounded by the rules of generating bullshit vs just reporting the truth - can still get outside our natural detection systems just by being ten times faster.

I guess what I’m saying is this is like that moment in the Cambrian or whatever when all the oxygen got released, and most of the life just got fucked and that was the end of their story. Just because a niche has been stable for a long time doesn’t mean it’s always going to be there.

Like, imagine a sci fi story about the entire atmosphere being stripped off of Earth, and the subsequent struggle for survival. How it would alter humanity’s history fundamentally, even if we survived, and even if we got the atmosphere back the human culture we knew would be gone.

That’s the level of event we’re facing. We’re in a sci fi story where the air is turning off and we all need to learn to live in vacuum and the only things we get to keep are the parts we can transform into airtight containers.

It might be that way right now, but instead of airtight it’s cryptographically-secure enclaves of knowledge and culture that will survive through the now presumably-endless period of history called “Airless Earth”.

Like having the atmosphere was the intro level of the game. Like in Far Cry 2, when you go to the second area, and it’s drier and more barren and there’s less ammo and cover and now they have roadblocks.

Our era of instinctively-navigable information is over. We’re all in denial because the atmosphere doesn’t go away, so we can’t deal with it, so it can’t be happening, so it’s not happening. But soon the denial won’t be possible any more.

How are those things self-serving?

Guess we’ll never know unless someone wastes the energy to find out.

Who cares?

Only for people who are decades old. For some babies, it was mere months.

Fucking amen. We must do away with all coercive approaches to cultural norms.

Durricanes

How is that sentence an attack in any way?

How is his saying this an example of them being targeted?

And this guy saying he thinks Beryl is a non-binary name isn’t bigotry. Perhaps they’re targeting him for something else that he did that was bigoted? Did he do something else like that?

minge lol that’s a new one for me

But is it weird? Beryl is a decidedly androgynous name.

What’s weird is that his saying this turned into a news story.

They’ve been waiting a while to use this stock image.

WW3 started two years ago

It’s not a proxy war between Russia and the US. It’s a proxy war between China and the US.

Russia and Ukraine are the pawns

I’m not an expert either and I could have predicted the invasion based on:

• huge buildup of troops in preparation for invasion
• 8 years prior they had invaded after saying they wouldn’t