Thank fucking God.
I'm not totally surprised. There was so much artificial strength projection, and a more desperate air to the late stage of the campaign that looked to me like a campaign that was seeing different info than what they were saying.
Hopefully, a lack of a super majority might limit the damage he'll cause.
Also, I don't want the US to meddle in foreign countries' affairs, but I'd like our leaders to refrain from flattering and supporting nationalists and authoritarians.
The impression is surprisingly bad.
Still weird, though. But I guess this is what we've got to get used to. Eventually, they'll probably sound much more convincing.
To add to this, I've been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I've never given any thought to the name. It's all capitalized. I didn't think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.
I've used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we're not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.
I'd say to any and everyone, "You know, you don't have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there's this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don't have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?"
I didn't even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people's attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.
Yeah!
Fully Automated is the game system and world. And "A Demonstration of Power" is a playable story. It's basically a short, interactive story about an auditor trying to find out why someone appears to be trying to keep them from accessing some unremarkable archival sensor data from the date of a blackout five years earlier.
My frustration is that I think terms like "settler violence" misinform people:
We need to hold the whole Israeli government and a bunch of specific NGOs accountable for all of this.
I don't really know. It shouldn't be, but I have not seen any newspaper report "West Bank pogroms continue to increase post Oct. 7, despite international complaints."
I just want to say that the most disturbing part of this is not that she did this. It's that this is the message and image that she has carefully decided will help her achieve her career and personal goals.
Perhaps what could be worse is if she's right.
I don't think she is. I see a lot of signs of the left failing in ways that make me nervous. but recognition of the senselessness of imperialism is not one of these. I think there is a very strong, clear, growing consensus that our foreign policy is terrible. Many people don't care that it's terrible for people in other countries, only that it's terrible for them, but that's still a win.
I don't love the concept of "isolationism" per se, but between that in empire, I'll choose isolationism every time. I know there is a liberal establishment that finds isolationism more shocking that defunding the police, and I'm glad that they're upset. This whole global domination thing that Haley and Biden and Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and Hilary Clinton are obsessed with is just fucking terrible.
God, I will freely admit: it can get so much worse than Biden.
I want to add a word that I never see that needs to enter the mainstream lexicon:
Apparently, this isn't a commonly known term, although it's less obscure to Jews. A pogrom is a form of terrorism in which a population decides to get rid of or inflict their hatred on a marginalized ethnic group by routinely rolling through their towns or neighborhoods dolling out unrestrained violence. It is often accompanied by warnings and demands that the population relocate or face constantly escalating barbarism. It's a form of persistent mass terrorism, usually sanctioned by the state.
Pogroms as a familiar concept emerged as a practice in Russia in the 19th and 20th century toward Jews, though they're well known to have been used throughout history. Traditionally, Jews have been the historical target of pogroms for centuries, and it's not a coincidence that Israeli Jews are using these tactics. These are familiar to them. They know exactly what they are doing. This is NOT independent acts of violence, this is a reenactment of atrocities faced by the grandparents and great grandparents of many Israelis Jews.
Pogroms are always horrific and depraved on their own. But the added context that these people are appropriating the weapons of extermination that they know well from the receiving end, it's just... I don't quite have the words to capture my horror.
These are pogroms. They are a relic of the medieval era and of the atrocities of the 1800s and early 1900s. They should stay in history, but they are being dusted off with deliberate intent by Itmar Ben-Gvir and the exterminationist wing of mainstream Israeli society.
These are not "Rising tensions" or "Settler violence", they are POGROMS. We all need to say it.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
This is a great article.
That's interesting.
I can see why you'd think we're the same person, and why any attempt to prove we're not is going to looks wildly suspicious, but if it helps, here is the conversation I was referencing: https://aleph.land/@andrewrgross/112452794853158836
You can check the time, it's all real. I had that conversation on May 16th, and then commented here on the 17th.
My account on Mastodon and my account here are both months and months old, while Harold appears to have made their account around the time that they posted that comment. I'm not sure what their motivation was, but they posted a few things and got banned from their server.
Anyway, that's not me. I don't think it's a coincidence. I think their comment looks like an inarticulate imitation of mine.
It's pretty weird, and I appreciate you sharing the screen shot. Make of it all what you will.
Can you explain this reference? Everyone keeps mentioning a Harold, and I see that it's getting upvoted a lot, so I think I'm the only one who doesn't know what this means.
I think it's fucked up when people create ideological conditions for personhood. The whole point of fundamental human rights is that we afford them to everyone. It's not like it's an accident that we give them to the very worst people. That's kind of the core concept.
If you're opposed to the concept of universal human rights, I don't love it, but I can accept that. I think that's probably a majority opinion, honestly. But I just feel like whenever someone says that a group of people "aren't people", I think we should make sure we're not tip-toeing around that. It should be out on the table.
The fact that there aren't patients seems immaterial. The rules against this aren't predicated on how many patients are inside.
By militarizing the hospital, they've made it a target, which you're not supposed to do. That's essential infrastructure. That's jeopardizing that critical infrastructure by using it as a shield.
It's not good.
You know, part of it is that I grew up drinking in the same propaganda. I GET the arguments.
In one sense, a lot has already ended. I think a lot of people in Israel -- I'm thinking primarily of those we used to think of as non-radical -- are in grief. Not just over Oct. 7, but because they know subconsciously that the good times are over. They were living in a fantasy, and now comes a rude awakening.
Either they accept a far right fascist police state or they give up the dream of unchallenged dominion over what they believe is their birthright. Either way, their dream of a progressive, modern, fully-Jewish state over the whole region was never possible because it required ignoring the reality of millions of unwanted people, and now they're crashing into the hard realization that the dream is dead. I think it's possible for that to be replaced with a new dream that includes equal rights for non-Jews, but that's still going to be a painful process that millions of people will have to be dragged into.
And now I have to witness both the pain of people I related to in some way, and also the reminder of what we're all capable of. These people are tying their brains in knots to perpetuate generational horrors against a subjugated group, like a kid who escaped a childhood of abuse only to grow up and perpetuate the same thing on their kids. And not only that, I'm not naive enough to think I wouldn't be capable of it too. I come from a different circumstance, but if I'd been born there? I'd probably be on board. No one wants to believe this, but most likely, so would you. So would most of us.
Add to all this that I'm also clear-eyed that there are plenty of people who do not have the mental complexity to protect one group of people without dehumanizing their oppressors. I don't really blame them, but I can see that in their heart, they don't really mind mass slaughter, they just have different preferences for who should be on the receiving end. Would they care if it was me? Or my kid? I pray I never need to find out. My plan is to just keep trying to make a world where everyone is safe and hope it works out.
It's terrible to watch on so, so, SO many levels.
We don't have a union.
I'd like to form or join one, but we don't have one at the moment.
It's true, but it doesn't mean I can't feel badly for these people too.
My empathy is not a finite resource.
I had a recent conversation on Mastodon with an Israeli American who was complaining about the rampant increase in antisemitism he's experienced, and then the devastation and sense of abandonment he and other Israelis feel... and it was tragic.
It's a country that has been traumatized, but is also now addicted to unhealthy coping strategies. A lot of these people feel constantly victimized, and its a legitimate feeling, but they don't seem aware of the degree to which they've formed a society designed to maintain a permission structure for constant fear and hate.
I feel so badly for these people. But unfortunately, the situation demands that we stop them from continuing this atrocity.
I don't feel like the deepfakes are the fundamental problem. Honestly, I think they're a tiny symptom of a much more significant concern, and if we take care of that, foreign deepfakes will be irrelevant.
See, elections are an exercise in story telling. Multiple actors tell stories to multiple audiences and ask them to vote on which story resonates with them more. The biggest actors are the campaigns themselves, followed by allies like their parties, other politicians, thought leaders, the media, lobby groups, activists groups, and so on. And foreign actors are a part of that.
The problems presented in the article are really three things:
If any single messaging campaign can sway an election, it definitionally means that the campaign was less effective with all its money and staff and allies than a random nobody on twitter spreading nonsense. Which American nobodies already do anyway, regardless of whether the Ayatollah gets involved.
The problem is that our elections are vapid exercises in media manipulation rather than genuine exercises of participatory democracy, and the existing manipulators hate competition. The result isn't to limit competition, it's to focus on creating a free and fair democracy with a healthy media ecosystem.
Are you saying that if the turkey that I mailman is frosty it could jujubee the training data microwave?