It's simply vomit inducing to learn that the "the US military is the largest polluter in the world" factoid only refers to the on-paper oil purchases of the US military and does not take into account all the myriad of other ways it pollutes, poisons, and actively destroys the Earth. It is polluting far past the point of it even being quantifiable. There is truly no greater threat to the whole globe, no greater evil, than the USA and its military.
It is year 2001. I see on the news that the local Seoul municipal government had to spend its own money cleaning up the oil spill at the Yongsan Army Garrison. It was known for 10 years, apprently. When I was entering middle school in 2006, the United States forces in Korea claimed that it was fixed, but the pollution worsened. My parents protested against the base's presence in 2002 after the US military killed two high school students walking home from school and the killers were acquitted. The girls were not much older than my older sister at the time. In 2025, you will see people on websites like Reddit that so badly wants to acquit the two civilian murderers while painting the Korean people rising up to protest against the occupiers as "political hijacking of a tragedy."
In december 2012, fresh off my first semester off from a university in the USA, I am visiting my grand aunt in Niigata. On the TV, there's a panel show discussing the US proposed military's removal of 9,000 marines, an agreement that was reached in april. As of 2024, it hasn't fully happened. In 2024, however, I do see on the TV that the presidential hopeful Kamala Harris secured the release of a yank soldier that ran over 2 Japanese civilians with his car from jail. One of the leading news casters in the mainstream USA network TV calls this a great victory for justice.
In 2019, I am starting my second MA in Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi. I lived in Aiea, 20 minutes by drive (45 minutes with traffic but let's not get into that) away from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, but only 5 minutes from a military base, at a distant relative's basement-garage-apartment. There were some weeks where I was unable to use the tap water because the US military base would have its fuel leak directly into the springs where we got our water. In 2025, the only people ever indicted were 2 civilians for 1 of such incidents.
Starting my PhD program in Upstate New York in 2022, I am talking to one of my PhD advisors. She got into academia because she was from Guam and her people, despite the land being owned by the USA, have no political representation in the USA congress to influence what goes on on the island. She sees being in the academia as one of the few ways to at least try to introduce some local voice into the conversation. She talks about the fuel dumping that happens in Guam. We both share a sigh and a knowing nod.
Everywhere the United States' military goes, it leaves behind a trail of suffering that it will simply not address. It leaves a deep scar in every local community and the only people that the military ever demands responsibility from are the civilians they're occupying, not ever themselves.
The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions.
A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Like generally, if taking any post about how AI users are evil and/or morally deficient and/or entitled manchildren because they don't care about the environmental impact of their little toy and replacing "using AI" with "watching youtube" (or "playing games online", or "watching netflix" or "streaming music" or any other frivolous internet activity with a similar level of environmental impact) would make you no longer agree with it, that's a pretty solid indicator that it's not actually environmental impacts that you're concerned about.
@shirtshawaiian well, I *have* looked it up and Objectively speaking it's "anywhere near" and then some. The most unfavorable estimate for energy consumption from individual AI usage (the one commonly used by people when they talk about how bad using AI is for the environment) is that a single chatgpt query uses 2.6Wh of energy. Watching a 1-hour video on the internet uses 400 to 800Wh, depending on factors like video quality or what device you're watching it on. This means that the environmental impact of watching youtube (or netflix, or any other video streaming service) for an hour is roughly equivalent to using chatgpt 153 to 306 times.
And like. I am someone who doesn't use AI or fw the AI Industry, and spends a frankly unhealthy amount of my free time watching youtube. But I'm just pointing out how, once you put the energy consumption of individual AI usage in context of how it compares to the energy consumption of pretty much anything else we use the internet for, and notice how you never see statements like "I'd fw watching youtube if it wasn't so bad for the environment" from the same people, the way people on here talk about the environmental impact of AI starts looking less like a principled environmental stance and more like a post-hoc attempt to add moral legitimacy to a stance that actually has very little to do with environmental impacts.
[ID: tags. # like generally is being very generous here #i have thoughts on this i wanna come back and type abt it in tags #took me a few rereads to comprehend the post #bc Objectively ai is impacting the environment in a way different from youtube video games etc #like just replacing the text makes the past False #post* not past #like thats just misinformation at that point #then again i could be wrong i will be honest haven't researched the environmental impact of using youtube etc #but im pretty sure its not anywhere near what Al is doing #i'd fw Al if it weren't unethically sourced and also so bad for the environment /end ID]
does watching netflix, youtube, etc destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for Black and brown communities, or is the only metric "energy consumption"?
Considering that keeping any of those services running requires relying on the usage of datacenters whose carbon and water footprint had already been a cause of concern for years before generative AI was even invented, and that the practice of building datacenter infrastructure near impoverished black and brown communities definitely didn't get started with the invention of AI, the answer is: Yes, netflix, youtube etc. also destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for black and brown communities, and the fact that you're flippantly asking this question as a gotcha is further evidence of how people treat the environmental angle primarily as a way to add to the appearance of moral legitimacy over the AI Techbros™ and nothing else.
Sorry it's still not comparable. You need to be comparing similar things. One chatgpt query compared to one Google search. Except you probably have to ask chatgpt a few follow up questions because it's stupid and doesn't get it right the first time. Watching/uploading a video on YouTube compared to the creation of an AI video. A camera image or photoshop usage compared to an AI image.
Those are the numbers that matter. Because everyone's excuse to use AI is "well the internet uses a lot of power too and we use that so it's ok to use AI" and the reality is, just because we let the internet completely take over so that you literally cannot navigate the world without using it anymore, doesn't mean it's ok to do that AGAIN with something WORSE. In an ideal world, we'd all reject AI so hard the tech bros heads spin, and then we'd make rules banning bot accounts which every day account for more and more internet traffic, and then we'd work towards removing unnecessary forced internet usage like qr code menus and downloading apps to access concert tickets and bus maps and washer dryers, and keep trying to find ways to reverse the dependence we've developed.
At the end of the day while OP's original argument does have some merit, that line of thinking is being weaponized by losers as a "so really AI is fine and just a drop in the bucket anyway so why fight progress might as well use it"
I think comparing genai usage to how it stacks up internet usage habits that people are likely to actually have is not only a perfectly reasonable point of comparison, but also probably more useful to put its actual effects into perspective than comparing use cases unit-by-unit.
Like yeah, one chatgpt query is not directly comparable to watching or uploading a youtube video, but I don't see how illustrating the point "this extremely common internet habit you've probably spent hours doing in the past consumes more energy per hour than the number of queries you'd probably make if you spent the same entire hour using chatgpt" lacks merit as a point of comparison just because it's not one unit of the same use case being compared.
As for your last point, I've clarified several times that I do think AI usage as it currently exists is environmentally unsustainable, but so is the majority of things we use datacenter infrastructure for, and we're gonna have to collectively confront that fact sooner or later, but that 1) people convincing themselves that it's only AI that's exceptionally environmentally damaging is actively counterproductive to confronting that fact, and 2) that treating the environmental impact of any of these services as a marker of individual moral failure on the users' side is stupid and useless, and that includes AI users. My point is not "the entire internet has a really bad environmental impact so there are no problems with AI actually"
every single one of these freaks who are talking about ice going Too Far and how there's "no place in america" for this was hardcore promoting the dems as the Tough On The Border party last year like that was their CENTRAL selling point during the election cycle so they pushed for beefed up ice funding just in time to hand that shit to trump
feb 2024:
and even as trump began his second term and shit was getting Bad they were still desperately trying to push the idea that biden was Better on the border than trump bc he did more deportations. truly fucking wild to witness
january 2025:
"these guys are terrible at everything" BRO. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
That homeless camp shooting in Minneapolis is, I think, a great example of how reactionary rhetorical "gun violence" is. This has happened a number of times in Minneapolis, where somebody walks into a camp and shoots a bunch of people. I don't know that anyone has been caught for it in any of the instances. The working assumption seems to be that these incidents are gang-related due to the incidence of drug use in the camps.
The official response has been for the city to clear these camps in the name of "reducing gun violence." The camps existing is generating "gun violence", so these people who already have so little need to have all their shit destroyed in the name of public safety. They will not provide special services to help these people, they will not even have a cop car watch a camp. We are justifying anti-homeless measures by invoking the moral panic of "gun violence." Of which these people are victims.
This most recent episode is also interesting because it surrounds a land owner who has been trying to protect this camp. The city has been trying to force him to clear it for some time now and he's refused. So now, in the name of "stopping gun violence" and "public safety" they're terrorizing these poor people. After something so horrific. And they're suing the fucking land owner to get back the money they spent on the operation to clear the camp.
You need to wake up and recognize how liberals invoke "gun violence" to elicit a reactionary impulse.
guy who just woke up from a three year coma yesterday and missed the targeted assassination of hundreds of palestinian journalists and their families using american bombs and american students being black bagged by masked brownshirts and dragged to concentration camps on american soil for writing op-eds opposing genocide: first they came for the late night hosts—
obviously everything happening in the us is horrific but (like everything in trump's traveling carnival of government) it's mostly exceptional in now slapdash and clownish the cruelty is. let us please not forget that the EU has been paying foreign governments to torture and murder asylum seekers for years -- and australia's been doing the 'sending refugees to unaccountable offshore camps' thing for more than two decades. & like i say this not to detract from the justified fury and outrage for the situation in the usa but to urge everyone to analyse it not as some bizarre abberation but as something that fits alongside a long list of policies long pursued by the usa and other imperial core nations
Sources at Eilat port tell Israeli media the closure will 'symbolise a victory for the Houthis and a loss for the Israeli economy'
Israel's Eilat port will halt operations from Sunday after failing to pay its debts following a steep drop in revenue caused by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
The Israeli business and economics newspaper The Calcalist reported on Thursday that the Eilat municipality had frozen the port's bank accounts, amounting to approximately 10 million shekels ($3m), due to unpaid taxes.
The newspaper reported that the port had recorded a steep drop in revenue due to the Yemeni group's attacks on ships linked to Israel.
Israel's Shipping and Ports Authority said on Wednesday that due to the "financial crisis it has entered due to the ongoing conflict, the Eilat Municipality informed the port's management of the seizure of all its bank accounts due to debts owed to the municipality.
"As a result, a notice was received from the Shipping and Ports Authority indicating that Eilat Port is expected to shut down and cease all activity starting this coming Sunday," it added.
Last week, we learned from the Associated Press that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — the government agency which manages billions in overseas “humanitarian” aid programs — plotted to overthrow Cuba’s communist regime via a covertly-funded fake Twitter platform.
Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.
USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn’t established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID’s authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us — but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.
Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the “the two primary functions” of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world,” and to bring to the United States “prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.” [“Police Program is Called CIA Cover,” New York Times, May 7, 1978]
Dan Mitrione wasn’t a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID’s Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government’s police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID’s coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.
By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.
Brazil’s military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil’s president — and she’s not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.
The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.
Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione’s human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil’s police.
…
Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay’s Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who’d been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.
…
A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:
— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed “Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.
– Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine.
—Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.
According to Victoria Sanford’s “Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala,” USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.
—El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992.
Further reading: Winning the Peace - USAID and the Demobilization of the Nicaraguan Contras, Hidden Terrors (excerpts) by A. J. Langguth, Counterinsurgency in Vietnam: lessons for today, The Last Mission
how is it that every person on this site recognizes that their parents being fucking tyrants had permanent negative psychological ramifications but if you ask them about the rights of children they go "oh well i think everyone should be locked in a windowless room under their parents' supervision until their Brain Finishes Developing to make sure pedophiles and the insidious chinese influences of tiktok don't make them into bad christians ^_^"
So Trump Administration's weaponized Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent out a mass "voluntary survey" to Barnard University teachers and staff asking them if they were Jewish.
This was not sent to their school-affiliated offices and emails, but to their personal phones and email addresses.
How did the EEOC know the personal contact information of all of these people? Why, their employer, the College, gave it to them, of course!
Several Barnard staff members told CNN the college has their personal contact information in case of emergency only. “The cellphone belongs to me, it doesn’t belong to Barnard,” said Nara Milanich, chair of the school’s history department.
Milanich, who is Jewish, said she “didn’t even know it was legal” for the school to turn her information over.
Another staff member who received the text, and who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for their job, expressed fears it might not just have been their own information that was shared with the government.
“It would be one thing if they gave them my office number, but they gave them my cellphone number, and who knows what else? I’m concerned that they may have given the numbers of my emergency contacts and my loved ones, who have nothing to do with any of this. I’m worried if they gave other personal identifying information about me,” the staff member said.
Ostensibly, this was all done as part of a US government's "investigation" into alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses - the irony of which seems to have been lost of them.
“They’re not concerned about antisemitism, they’re inflaming antisemitism,” Debbie Becher, a Sociology professor at Barnard, who is also Jewish, said. “They’re concerned with tearing down the institutions of higher education and shutting down any speech that is pro-Palestinian or critical of Israel.”
plagiarism isnt bad because its theft -- copying is not theft, and theft is not inherently bad. to the extent and in the places where it is bad, it's bad because it's lying
The militant group in Yemen was still firing at ships and shooting down drones, while U.S. forces were burning through munitions.
When he approved a campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthi militant group into submission, President Trump wanted to see results within 30 days of the initial strikes two months ago.
By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials.
But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.
The Houthis shot down several American MQ-9 Reaper drones and continued to fire at naval ships in the Red Sea, including an American aircraft carrier. And the U.S. strikes burned through weapons and munitions at a rate of about $1 billion in the first month alone.
It did not help that two $67 million F/A-18 Super Hornets from America’s flagship aircraft carrier tasked with conducting strikes against the Houthis accidentally tumbled off the carrier into the sea.
By then, Mr. Trump had had enough.
Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, who was already in Omani-mediated nuclear talks with Iran, reported that Omani officials had suggested what could be a perfect offramp for Mr. Trump on the separate issue of the Houthis, according to American and Arab officials. The United States would halt the bombing campaign and the militia would no longer target American ships in the Red Sea, but without any agreement to stop disrupting shipping that the group deemed helpful to Israel.
Announcing the cessation of hostilities, the president sounded almost admiring about the militant Islamist group, despite vowing earlier that it would be “completely annihilated.”
“We hit them very hard and they had a great ability to withstand punishment,” Mr. Trump said. “You could say there was a lot of bravery there.” He added that “they gave us their word that they wouldn’t be shooting at ships anymore, and we honor that.”
Whether that proves to be true remains to be seen. The Houthis fired a ballistic missile at Israel on Friday, triggering air raid sirens that drove people off beaches in Tel Aviv. The missile was intercepted by Israeli air defenses.[...]
Mr. Trump’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, was concerned that an extended campaign against the Houthis would drain military resources away from the Asia-Pacific region. His predecessor, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., shared that view before he was fired in February.
By May 5, Mr. Trump was ready to move on, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials with knowledge of the discussions in the president’s national security circle. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions.[...]
General Kurilla had been gunning for the Houthis since November 2023, when the group began attacking ships passing through the Red Sea as a way to target Israel for its invasion of Gaza.
But President Joseph R. Biden Jr. thought that engaging the Houthis in a forceful campaign would elevate their status on the global stage. Instead, he authorized more limited strikes against the group. But that failed to stop the Houthis.
Now General Kurilla had a new commander in chief.
He proposed an eight- to 10-month campaign in which Air Force and Navy warplanes would take out Houthi air defense systems. Then, he said, U.S. forces would mount targeted assassinations modeled on Israel’s recent operation against Hezbollah, three U.S. officials said.
Saudi officials backed General Kurilla’s plan and provided a target list of 12 Houthi senior leaders whose deaths, they said, would cripple the movement. But the United Arab Emirates, another powerful U.S. ally in the region, was not so sure. The Houthis had weathered years of bombings by the Saudis and the Emiratis.
By early March, Mr. Trump had signed off on part of General Kurilla’s plan — airstrikes against Houthi air defense systems and strikes against the group’s leaders. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named the campaign Operation Rough Rider.
At some point, General Kurilla’s eight- to 10-month campaign was given just 30 days to show results.
In those first 30 days, the Houthis shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), hampering Central Command’s ability to track and strike the militant group. Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses, making real the possibility of American casualties, multiple U.S. officials said.
That possibility became reality when two pilots and a flight deck crew member were injured in the two episodes involving the F/A-18 Super Hornets, which fell into the Red Sea from the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman within 10 days of each other.[...]
the cost of the operation was staggering. The Pentagon had deployed two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses, to the Middle East, officials acknowledged privately. By the end of the first 30 days of the campaign, the cost had exceeded $1 billion, the officials said.
So many precision munitions were being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners were growing increasingly concerned about overall stocks and the implications for any situation in which the United States might have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.
And through it all, the Houthis were still shooting at vessels and drones, fortifying their bunkers and moving weapons stockpiles underground.
The White House began pressing Central Command for metrics of success in the campaign. The command responded by providing data showing the number of munitions dropped. The intelligence community said that there was “some degradation” of Houthi capability, but argued that the group could easily reconstitute, officials said.
Senior national security officials considered two pathways. They could ramp up operations for up to another month and then conduct “freedom of navigation” exercises in the Red Sea using two carrier groups, the Carl Vinson and the Truman. If the Houthis did not fire on the ships, the Trump administration would declare victory.
Or, officials said, the campaign could be extended to give Yemeni government forces time to restart a drive to push the Houthis out of the capital and key ports.
In late April, Mr. Hegseth organized a video call with Saudi and Emirati officials and senior officials from the State Department and the White House in an effort to come up with a sustainable way forward and an achievable state for the campaign that they could present to the president.
The group was not able to reach a consensus, U.S. officials said.[...]
Also skeptical of a longer campaign were Vice President JD Vance; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Mr. Hegseth, people with knowledge of the discussions said, went back and forth, arguing both sides.
But Mr. Trump had become the most important skeptic.
On April 28, the Truman was forced to make a hard turn at sea to avoid incoming Houthi fire, several U.S. officials said. The move contributed to the loss of one of the Super Hornets, which was being towed at the time and fell overboard. That same day, dozens of people were killed in a U.S. attack that hit a migrant facility controlled by the Houthis, according to the group and aid officials.
Then on May 4, a Houthi ballistic missile evaded Israel’s aerial defenses and struck near Ben-Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
On Tuesday, two pilots aboard another Super Hornet, again on the Truman, were forced to eject after their fighter jet failed to catch the steel cable on the carrier deck, sending the plane into the Red Sea.
By then, Mr. Trump had decided to declare the operation a success.
Houthi officials and their supporters swiftly declared victory, too, spreading a social media hashtag that read “Yemen defeats America.”
12 May 25
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