This was my X:
My understanding of USAID is that it is primarily a front for CIA operations.
Evidence:
??? You want brain scans?
swlabr
joined 2 years ago
Shhh my amusement has not run out yet
nah what’s happening here is I am making claim X. Then you go: are you claiming Y? Prove it! And then I go: no. Then you start talking all this shit about covert CIA ops and mafia pizza joints and whatever, showing no signs of understanding that I said X. What choice do I have but to conclude that you are an idiot
Hey, buddy, listen. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. Sorry if I hurt your feelings. I love the CIA. And USAID. Really, I do. Please don't accuse me of ad hominum [sic], that would break my heart. And evidence? Of course, there's no evidence. The US is a perfect little angel; everything it does is moral and good. It's just that big old meanie trump making a mess of things, that's all. Does that make it better?
Well, at this point, you're just being obtuse.
I still don’t get what a non-covert front is.
That's a term you made up, so that's a classic "you problem"!
You said USAID is a front for CIA operations and it isn’t covert when it does these operations. [...] Like I’m picturing a pizza parlor which is a front for a mafia operation, but instead of being covert, it is open. So it says “Mafia’s Pizza” instead of “Tony’s Pizza”. Are you thinking USAID is something like that?
Again, you're the one coming up with this. Stop thinking. You aren't good at it.
Propaganda certainly does exist. I never said that it didn’t.
Great!
I’m disputing that USAID is a CIA operation and not an independent organization with it’s own goals and directives.
Good for you!
I probably just misunderstood what you mean by “front”.
Sure.
I read it as something like a feigned appearance.
That would be the long and short of it.
Maybe I’m just having trouble understanding how a something can be both openly avowed (not covert) and yet non-openly avowed (a front) at the same time.
Definitely don't look up these terms, they might be above your reading level:
- ulterior motives
- chess for the intermediate player
- palace intrigue and scheming eunuchs
I agree with USAID being a tool for soft power.
Great!
So are many things, like Hollywood. Doesn’t mean Hollywood is a CIA operation.
Putting aside the equivocation, that's a lousy counterexample. Are you just going to pretend like propaganda doesn't exist?
covert
Don’t put words in my mouth, bud.
The primary benefit of USAID to the US is as a tool of soft power, internationally. You think the US just does things to be nice? That they don’t have any strategy in mind when throwing cash at other countries? That the CIA wouldn’t play any role in US foreign policy?
The pundits in question are Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. More accurately speaking they are liberals.
Did you drop an /s or jk there bud
Dems do literally anything to materially oppose fascism, even in the most minuscule way challenge (impossible)
Abstracted abstract:
Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.
I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.
*
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My mistake! Sorry, Captain America! I will never be cynical about US foreign policy ever again!