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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • Sending NATO in fundamentally breaks the treaties upon which the organization was founded. NATO isn’t a joint military force to send to places for freedom and democracy, it’s a defensive organization. Without an explicit article 5 declaration from a current member state against a specific threat for a specific reason, a deployment of NATO would be undermining of the organization’s mission in itself, putting in question whether NATO is there to protect its members or just to be used as a cudgel for potential inconvenient threats because the alternative is a financial strain.

    Interventions like this, such as the 2011 intervention on Libya to enforce UN resolution 1973 will fuel arguments that NATO is altering its mission from defending its members to participate in US led (or in this case also French led) interventionism. Upon such a time where threats are no longer direct as is the case of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, this will have implications on the future of the organization and questions will be made about its purpose, as it has happened before after the fall of the USSR. Ultimately NATO’s mandate must be upheld and strictly followed, for the sake of the treaty. At least that’s the opinion i share.



  • I just read an article that said both Kamala and Trump are keen on helping out. You know, with the indiscriminate murder of thousands of children.

    I gotta say this is really dragging US’s public image through sewage. People weren’t too keen on the US’s foreign policy after that Afghanistan withdrawal, but basically delivering a country and millions of dollars of military equipment to a terrorist group on a silver platter doesn’t even come close to literally helping out murdering children and paying for it.

    I sure hope the US government comes to their senses at some point in time, preferably soon and stops this for the literal sake of children. At this point what choice is even there for American people.



  • On top of that can you imagine the US actually punishing its heads of state for anything on behalf of an international organization?

    The US is literally funding and helping carry out the genocide and war crimes against an entire people with absolute impunity. Its two parties fully support it. Its corporations and universities fully collude with it and name and shame employees and students that don’t in public, so their livelihoods are affected.

    It seems all these international organizations can do is publish statements that the law is being broken. At least the history books have a legal, contemporary point of view, i guess. Peak performative justice.

    It’s not just the US. Most countries aren’t doing any meaningful change to counter climate change. It’s just net zero by 2300, ban straws here, make stupid soda caps that stick to the bottle, performative trash separation that gets dumped together, magic carbon offsetting and climate summits of empty promises that overall net more pollution due to heads of state and heads of corporations traveling somewhere rather than if it hadn’t happened at all. Just kicking the can down the road, while living through the hottest summers on record.



  • Yeah i didn’t necessarily mean our DNA, more like our internal fauna, in particular our gut fauna, which has tremendous implications over how our body functions, influencing our brains, metabolism and immune system.

    If bacteria are changing and our bodies are about a one to one ratio of human cell to bacteria cells according to recent studies, it follows that bacteria changing does not preclude us from changing as well, since not only are bacteria a part of us, we fundamentally depend on bacteria to be alive. We cannot ever be separated from the evolution of bacteria.

    So while our own DNA will not change significantly in such a timescale, that doesn’t mean our internal metabolism processes will not change somehow, i would wager. Not only us, but all the animals around us that we eat and live with as well. It’s interesting to think, for instance, of vitamins we don’t produce but still need and we take from bacteria living inside us. I wonder if similar bacteria would, for instance, evolve to decompose plastics in our bodies or such like.






  • They say Hamas are terrorists because they attack innocent civilians and that may be true, but it seems that by the same metric, aren’t the IDF also terrorists for attacking innocent civilians in clearly marked vehicles ?

    Verily i say more, If we go by how much civilian infrastructure and casualties have been committed, one side is clearly acting more strongly within the definition of terrorist than the other.



  • Even if such a thing existed, which given the analysis parameters makes it far too complex for automation (like for instance, how would such a software distinguish between old deleted data still residing in empty space and a vault file hidden in empty space without a follow up analysis of the data itself. It would probably alert the user for something, but the amount of false positives would probably lead an untrained user to ignore the alerts eventually) i would guess it doesn’t, but if it did, it would have to process petabytes every day, from all over the country and the system would have to be maintained, which going by government record of informatics systems, doesn’t seem likely that it would be readily available for everyone that gets stopped at a border stop consistently. It’s like an anti virus search, with all the false positives it comes up with, but 100 times slower, plus the transmission of the entire disk clone file, plus the cloning process itself.

    Moreover the cost of maintaining such a system when 95%+ of the population doesn’t have the know how to use complex data obfuscation measures and LEO rarely obtains information out of these cursory searches for arrests. On published news articles LEO always ends up using snitches, google searches or usage of the TOR network in a given area to catch criminals. Data forensics only come into play later on. Presumably, dollar for dollar, they would probably invest in what works best instead of casting such a wide net.

    In sum, I’m not cleared to know such information, but i am guessing such a thing, while technologically possible, seems economically unfeasible and liable to be used only in specific cases. If i had a border security budget, i would certainly not invest in a mega server to swift through every bit of empty and occupied space of all the randomly selected people for a search that come in through the ports of entry. However i could be wrong.


  • I think you overvalue the skillset of border security. This may seem trivial to you but it’s uncommon to hire people trained to this level of competence and put them at every point of entry. A decent cybersecurity investigator needs a big salary.

    That would probably happen if you were already a suspect of something or a high profile person and they moved in resources for you. No way border security is randomly sweeping for headers and entropy, they basically just look at it with the explorer and clone it, possibly using some software to scan for known security vulnerabilities to access encrypted parts. That would be a court ordered search or a high profile crime investigation, or maybe a really really unlucky day where the expert was already there for another reason, but the rest i agree.

    If your threat model makes you a high profile person, then smuggling data in hidden containers is definitely not the best solution. A non associated personal cloud server is best.





  • Alright, thank you for explaining your opinion to me. You’re right, while i still maintain my position that i disagree with US policy in this regard, i do recognize that a lot of those countries’ actions also contributed to the current situation.

    And i also recognize that when criticism arises in Lemmy, in particular from certain Lemmy instances, there is a lot of propaganda and anti American sentiment, which i also find grating. Nevertheless I’d like to clarify that I’m not anti American and i do not think America is bad. I consider this statement reductionist of the entire combined work of 330 million people, as you said, and i would like to clarify that i meant that this specific course of action in this circumstance is bad, not the country, nor the people of the US.

    This criticism does not mean to disqualify the US of praise where praise is otherwise due, of course, although i would not agree that the outcomes of Israel relations were positive, but that is another matter altogether that i think would escape the purview of the criticism of CIA actions.

    I apologize for expressing myself in such a black and white way and I’ll try to be more mindful of reminding myself of expressing more nuance in future comments and be clearer of who and what specifically i am criticizing.


  • So the point is not wealth but spite ? You don’t have to act in good faith to cooperate with others. Like i said, in trade, a prosperous peer is worth more and generates more wealth than an ailing one.

    This is not an argument on good faith, it’s self interest and selfishness. It’s right there on game theory and pretty much the entire course of biological history and evolution. One might profit from destroying and seizing the resources of a peer, but in most cases that profit is inferior to quid pro quo cooperation.

    To me this is just acting deranged and nonsensical. Just being belligerent for the sake of cruelty and destruction. It’s more believable to me that its motivations are about projection of power and hegemony like other commenters have pointed out.