> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'

The right way to reply to that is: not everything that's legal must be public.

You probably don't want the rest of the world to see you poop, or pick your nose, or listen to every word you say. Almost everyone has things they'd be embarrassed to disclose to other people. And this can be weaponized against you should any rival gain access to it.

But they must have received this fine-tuning, right?

Otherwise it's hard to explain why they follow these negations in most cases (until they make a catastrophic mistake).

I often test this with ChatGPT with ad-hoc word games, I tell it increasingly convoluted wordplay instructions, forbid it from using certain words, make it do substitutions (sometimes quite creative, I can elaborate), etc, and it mostly complies until I very intentionally manage to trip it up.

If it was incapable of following negations, my wordplay games wouldn't work at all.

I did notice that once it trips up, the mistakes start to pile up faster and faster. Once it's made a serious mistakes, it's like the context becomes irreparably tainted.

> It is absolutely not a pointless war. If this war is won, it secures long-term peace in the region

If there's one thing I'm absolutely, 100% sure of, is that this war won't secure any long-term peace in the region.

We're in fairy tale narrative mode, I see.

In support of your comment, the FBI under Trump has become increasingly politicized, to the point it's merely doing and saying whatever Trump's administration wants them to say. Nothing coming from them is credible. Of course they are going to inflate the chance of the Iranians magically developing a mini-sub and striking Florida or whatever.

> A UN report in the mid-1990s claimed US sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright responded by saying "the price was worth it"

These kind of statements make my blood curdle. Much like Iran today, Iraq back then posed no threat to the US. So when Albright made these calculations, that "as much as it pained her", those 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it", as long as Iraq threatened its neighbors blah blah blah... she's was being very, very callous. A war criminal wouldn't have said it better.

"I'm willing to sacrifice children from some other country, as long as our military objectives are met, for the greater good!".

I wonder if Albright would have made the same calculus were those children from her home town.

Also, this in my mind goes to show this isn't a partisan issue. Democrats/Republicans, they are all pretty callous with wars in foreign lands. Trump is just very obnoxious about it, and pretty bad at planning, but they are all universally terrible.