Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself. 🙄

Israel is a rogue state.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it’s long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.

Exactly as noted in the article, it’s not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it’s not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It’s not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that’s exactly how it should be treated.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

I think they’re already fully aware of the threat, and in fact that’s exactly why I’ve disregarded everything that Harris has said (and notably not said) about Gaza or Israel or any of that.

There’s absolutely no way to know what her actual views are on any of it or what she intends to do, because no matter what they might be, she has no choice but to strike a pro-Israel pose for now, because if she doesn’t, those genocidal AIPAC fucks will do everything in their power to destroy her.

That’s also why, though I don’t oppose them, neither do I really support the protests. It’s probably a good thing to put some heat on Harris and on the Democrats more broadly, but it can’t possibly accomplish anything, again at least for now, because those AIPAC scumbags are circling like vultures, just waiting for an excuse to descend on anyone who looks like they might interfere with their genocidal ambitions.

The time to put the pressure on is after Harris is safely in office. And yes - we have much less leverage then, but that’s just the way it goes. If she’s going to actually do the right thing, it’s only going to be after she’s out of reach of those vindictive fuckwads.

The Cicero Institute also advocates legislation allowing new private prisons to enter the market and empowering governors to circumvent elected attorneys general by appointing ​“special prosecutors” to combat ​“public lawlessness.”

And there we have the actual key to all of this.

The goal is to reinstitute Victorian workhouses, updated for the modern age of private prisons and officially-sanctioned slave labor.

That’s it - nothing more. It’s not even an attempt at anything like an actual solution to the growing problem of homelessness - it’s only and entirely that wealthy psychopaths like Lonsdale see homeless people as a resource that’s not currently being exploited and that they want to exploit. Entirely in order to further their own wealth and privilege, they want to imprison these human beings and make them into slaves.

I’m entirely unsurprised.

D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I’ve never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that’s going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn’t manage to tie it all together, neither can he.

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

One of the greatest songs ever IMO, though I much prefer the original.

All songs start with silence, then build a series of sounds until a song is achieved, then return to silence, but few illustrate the magic and wonder of that process quite as well as A Forest.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they’re one catastrophic illness away from destitution.

Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he’s provided them with somebody.

And yes - to the degree that they’ve responded to his rhetoric, it’s because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn’t just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it’s a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.

It’s sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, “or” is the wrong conjunction - it should be “and.”

And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion’s share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they’ll be free to cause even more harm.

I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.

My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

(edited for clarity)

Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.

But they don’t really matter. They’re just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk’s weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don’t give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they’re funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.

This isn’t a culture war. That’s just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it’s not a war that might happen - it’s a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don’t do something, we’re going to lose it by forfeit.

I’m reasonably certain that the fundamental goal of US Middle East policy is destabilization.

For example, the amount of saber-rattling US politicisns do in regard to Iran appears to be inversely proportional to the actual threat it poses. When the hard-liners are in power, the US generally backs off and focuses elsewhere, but then when reformists gain power and it starts looking like Iran might settle down and stabilize a bit, suddenly the US government starts up another hue and cry about the threat it supposedly poses, which gives the hard-liners just the angle they need to take power again, at which point the US stops focusing on Iran again.

I presume it’s a hegemonic strategy. Stable and well-governed Middle East nations, with the sort of wealth they possess, could pose a threat to western hegemony, while unstable and poorly governed ones can’t.

So Israel is currently, in addition to carrying out a genocide in Gaza and an incremental and violent land grab in the West Bank, trying to start wars with four different neighbors - Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Yemen.

It’s as if it’s not even enough for them to be a rogue state - they want to be the roguest state.

I would go so far as to say that it’s vital that Biden handles court reform, because it has to be done before the election.

We can already be sure that Trump and his backers are planning legal challenges on whatever grounds might vaguely appear to be something resembling legitimate in the event that he loses, and we can also be sure that at least Thomas and Alito will rule in their favor, no matter how ludicrous their arguments might be, simply because they’re entirely and completely compromised. They’ve already demonstrated that law is irrelevant - that they serve demagoguery, shallow self-interest, bigotry and corruption. And given the chance, they WILL do their parts to destroy democracy in the US.

We can’t afford to give them the chance.

And that could be Biden’s legacy - the president who led the efforts that saved America from a fascist coup.

I’ve seen no evidence that they are.

What little organic commentary I’ve seen has been cautiously optimistic at worst.

The barrage of anti-Harris stuff that all started appearing at essentially the same time reeks of astroturf.

LOL, literally…

That’s just so perfect and so on-brand.