The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

With the entry of American and British troops into the center of Baghdad at noon this day, the fascist Baath régime has uttered it last words. Now, [the] régime is ousted, a major obstacle has been rubbed from the way of masses’ liberation in Iraq, but the expense is a gloomy future that the masses encounter in Iraq.

The collapse of this barbaric régime has not been an outcome of the struggle of working masses and toilers who are after welfare, life, freedoms, and happiness, but an outcome of the U.S. missiles and bombs, the most barbaric massacre and the operation of mass annihilation whose victims are thousands of the innocents children, elderly, women and men who all have no guilt in what is happening.

Millions have been displaced and have held their breaths for weeks due to devastating and ghastly horror. The collapse has occurred on the expense of destroying the infrastructure of the society and its economic pillars and edging it toward the whirlpool of chaos and insecurity. Such an outcome will not achieve the noble masses’ expectations which they have shed blood to enjoy for decades.

The USA is not the “liberator” of masses in Iraq. It is not the masses’ “savior”. The collapse of the Baath régime is a yield of a reactionary war waged by America to enthrall the world and impose its hegemony on it. This collapse can not be considered a victory for the masses in Iraq.

The USA and its allies have brought this régime to stand against communism and workers, freedom and equality, left and radicalism, and the efforts for a better life during the Cold War. They had backed him and strengthened his espionage and suppressive institutions. They had trained his criminal gangs. They had disregarded his crimes, operations of annihilation and bloodbaths. They have aligned in the régime’s trenches against the struggle of the masses in Iraq for liberation and equality. They had helped it live longer by imposing the economic sanction on the masses in Iraq, fettered their will and blown all their struggle efforts to present them handcuffed to the teeth of this barbaric régime.

The USA is responsible of the death of more than a million of peoples in Iraq due to the oppressive sanctions. Getting rid of the USA, its ominous rôle, its existence and the total of its plans and projects are an obvious goal declared by emancipatory masses in Iraq and all over the world for decades.

Because of its excessive recklessness, the USA blatantly talks about a military interim government to rule Iraq and openly deny the masses’ right of determining their political destiny and their expected political rule. America does not refrain from supporting nationalist, religious tribal and sectarian militias and groups, ex-hirelings of the fascist Baath régime and its ex-generals such as Al khazrajy, Al Samerrae and Al Jobory and nominates them as the bases of future government in Iraq disregarding the masses’ opinions and against their will.

The USA has no problem in handing the responsibility of ruling Basra and Amara to sheikhs whom society had swept since decades. The government, the pentagon is after, is not the representative of masses in Iraq as much as the case with the Baath régime. It enjoys no legitimacy and must unconditionally and immediately withdraw.

(Source.)

Use /c/popularculture for Hasan or contra or whatever. If the mods there say no contra then that's the way it is i guess.

I haven't consulted anyone about this so if a more senior mod wants to contradict me i get it.

Agree or disagree in the comments I'm pretty easy to influence so argue if you want