
Eliezer Yudkowsky on Trump's “maybe we shouldn't defend NATO” remark - r721
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154650743819228
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Mikeb85
So people are up in arms that Trump said things because, instead of taking
them at face value (the US is overspending for other nations' security),
they're reading into it too much.

Meanwhile Hillary and Obama (and the rest of the neo-cons opposing Trump) have
been marching us strait towards WWIII with their antagonization of Russia.

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meira
And to protect ISIS! ISIS! Europe is going to be nuked while protecting ISIS.
I Wonder how will we read about this in a few decades. Maybe the term
"european" will be synomym of idiots.

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novalis78
...it already does.

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danieltillett
I agree that being ambiguous is very, very dangerous, but I think that Putin
is smart enough to know that there is a limit that he can push and crossing
the NATO line is not a good idea. What we really have to worry about is
Putin's replacement. Is he going to be as smart.

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camperman
'The people in the national security bureaucracy--hell, even _me_ , even
though I'm not a national security bureaucrat and have only read a handful of
military history books--heard that and thought: "HOLY SHIT."'

I'm not sure how he's supposed to have his finger on the pulse of the national
security bureaucracy when he admits that he's a rank amateur.

Categorizing Trump's remarks from the interview as 'maybe we shouldn't defend
NATO' is bollocks. The question from the NYT was this: "If Russia came over
the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t
think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?"

The answer is here: [http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/trump-
nato/4...](http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/trump-nato/492341/)

Underlying this rambling nonsense is the assumption that Russia is some sort
of world aggressor.

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SideburnsOfDoom
> Underlying this rambling nonsense is the assumption that Russia is some sort
> of world aggressor.

Are you saying that this assumption would be wrong? Is Russia in no way
feeling expansionist at present?

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WalterSear
It is feeling threatened both by the US's clandestine involvement in the
former Soviet states and its attempt to hamstring it's natural gas industry
via the proxy war in Syria.

It has reason to speak and behave belligerantly.

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jpt4
A question for the moderators: Is flagging an automatic operation, or is mod
discretion required for its enactment, as well as its undoing?

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r721
[not a mod] I guess it's just a certain amount of user flags. This submission
was flagged/unflagged a few times already (big karma users can vouch for an
unflagging of a submission).

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jpt4
Thank you, I do recall now the relatively recent "vouch" unflag feature
launch.

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tomp
What's interesting is that in the UK, Corbyn was just elected (again) the
president of the second major party (not currently in power) on a platform of
stopping UK's nuclearly-armed submarines (essentially the UK's only nuclear
deterrent). Which is similar, yet a bit different (the US can protect itself
even without NATO, the UK can't without nuclear submarines), to what Trump's
saying, yet (many) people still wanted it!

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ovi256
Most geopolitical analysts agree that the US can't protect itself long term
without NATO. The short version is who controls Western Europe controls
Europe. Who controls Europe controls Eurasia. Who controls Eurasia controls
all of the world besides the Americas. The endgame of an united Eurasia is a
failure from the USA national security POV.

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9918281291
"To see more from Eliezer Yudkowsky on Facebook, log in or create an account."

No thanks!

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tobltobs
Considering the throw-away account you did already knew that your comment is
trash. Why did you waste those bytes anyway?

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lunula
I find it refreshing that they are unsupportive of the Facebook paywall.

