adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for “official acts”, and places the authority to determine what is and isn’t an “official act” in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn’t “get away with everything”, and we shouldn’t assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump’s eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

he looks like a wax figure holy shit

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

“idealism” is a funny way of saying “opposition to war”. you are making excuses for a country raining death on a civilian population. you are drawing a line in the sand, saying that we cannot have a better world than this, and actively defending an organization that is killing children. war is the problem i want to solve, and your “solution” doesn’t solve that problem.

the world is not “wretched”, it does not “work” in some predefined way you expect it to. you have just decided not to advocate for a worthy cause, because it falls outside the bounds of what you have arbitrarily decided it is possible for the world to be, even as larger and larger groups of people fight to obtain that which you call a “fantasy”. there is no use in accepting the world as it is, in presuming that things cannot change for the better. we can’t know if its impossible without trying, again and again, as many times as it takes. progress was never made by accepting the status quo. it was never made by limiting the scope of our ambition.

stop speaking as though deflecting blame from the IDF, deflecting responsibility onto a terrorist organization, and making excuses for why a famine should continue are the “realistic” outer bounds of what we can do. the world you say you want doesn’t come about by aligning yourself with forces that are currently driving war, injustice, and suffering in Gaza. it doesn’t come about by abdicating the IDF of the responsibility of the war crimes you admit its soldiers are committing. you are seeing the alternative, you are seeing a principled opposition to war unfolding around you, and deciding that it is unobtainable, deciding that it foolish, and aligning yourself with the war-makers.

I will not do the same. I recognize the history of anti-war movements, the ways in which they have failed to achieve their goals. I do not have delusions that war is easy to kill. I just don’t have the arrogance to assume I know what the outcome will be. Even if we fail to create a world without suffering, at least I can know that we tried. Free Palestine.

you’re constantly trying to frame opposition to Israel as a failure to understand. i’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. we understand the conflict. we understand the players. we understand that Hamas is a far-right organization, and would do harm if they were to come to greater power. we just don’t think that justifies the kinds of violence being leveled at the Palestinian people. i’m not pro-Palestine because i don’t understand the stakes, because i’m blindly following the underdog. i’m doing it because i object to the death of innocent people, because i oppose war, apartheid, displacement, and destruction in all its forms.

again, deflecting blame. it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter what “every single nation on Earth” would have done (although I think there’s plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn’t even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i’ve heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel’s actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don’t want to die of starvation. i don’t want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

whose rockets have been raining down on whose homes? the appeal of a potential future threat to Israeli lives outweighing the current, present threat towards magnitudes more Palestinian lives is played out. people here aren’t ride or die for Hamas, they just acknowledge that leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing them from getting food is both not likely to lead to less rockets on Israeli homes, and is in itself an act of genocide. when did appeals to not killing innocent Palestinians become support for Hamas to you? when did persistent, unending violence against the Palestinian people become “self-defence”?

this is not “think of the children”. its “tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government”. we aren’t appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i’m sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don’t get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they’re using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a “master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it”, if you’re genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.

beardown

did… did you make this account just to insert racist bullshit into the bear meme?

Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

people do nothing unless motivated

this is an assumption worth challenging. the evidence suggests, in fact, that people are almost always doing things!

you sure are fun

look, if the realities of a system or policy are statistically more likely to target queer people, it is a queer issue lol. restrictions on discussing sex publicly disproportionately affect those who are sexual minorities, because all “legitimate” channels for learning about sex are usually targeted for heterosexual couplings. there’s a reason why queer people have a vested interest in sex education. modesty laws are also more oppressive for queer people by their nature.

anything that regulates how people dress also regulates gender expression, because clothing in most of the world is gendered. there are things that women wear that men can’t, things that are “too much skin” for women and not men. if you legislate what people can wear, you have a very good tool for targeting queer folks, even if it theoretically could also be used to target other kinds of self-expression. you can’t make a modesty law that isn’t also anti-queer by extension, because modesty as a concept is defined by patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity.

right, but you do understand that these things are interrelated. not all anti-LGBT policies explicitly target only LGBT people. if you restrict dressing “differently” and talking about sex, the people who dress differently or have different kinds of sex (queer people) are systemically disadvantaged when compared to straight and cis people. and if there’s bigotry in your society, there’s no guarantee that these restrictive policies are going to be applied to everybody equally.

like, bathroom bills don’t have to mention trans people to target trans people exclusively, because very few other groups of people have the motivation to choose a bathroom that doesn’t align with their assigned sex at birth. if you restrict a behavior queer people are statistically highly likely to engage in, the fact that it could also impact other groups doesn’t make it not a queer issue.

Eh, can’t win em all. I will say, just as a parting thought, the things you’ve been saying are also ideological. Believing clean separations between ideas and concepts are possible, appealing to existing systems as a way of validating the moral rightness of other systems, even believing that there is an objective “good and truthful answer” is an ideological position. I’d say one of the more pernicious ideological positions a person can take is to believe they do not have an ideology. It makes it very difficult to think about or discuss why you believe the things you believe.