You obviously don’t know the history of voting tests. In the US, tests were designed to be virtually impossible for anyone to pass, but white voters didn’t have to take them, because the rule was you didn’t have to take the test if your grandparents could vote. They were implemented in a racist way.

You want to trust the government to design and implement tests, that sort of thing is what it could easily lead to, whether you want it or not.

Number 11 says, “cross out the number,” as in, only one number. Pretty sure you have to cross out “1” so that it’s just a bunch of zeros.

How and when did Tennessee become worse than Texas and Florida?

When Haslam retired. Which he did because he saw the writing on the wall that there was no longer a place for him.

Haslam wasn’t good, but as a corporate lackey, he just wanted to keep the machine running, he wasn’t ideologically committed to all the christofascist culture war bullshit, and would push back on it when it would rock the boat too much. For a few years, he held back the rising tide of fascism and the state was less bad than most of its neighbors. But as soon as he left, there was a massive wave of legislation making up for lost time. The people running things now are fascist idiots, whether ideologues or opportunists, unrestrained by conscience or reason. If Fox News runs a story about something, there will be legislation about it within a week.

How did things get this bad? Because the corporate lackies created the material conditions for it. They were happy to work with and spur on the christofascists because it gets them voting Republican. And now they’ve created a beast they can no longer control or restrain.

Personally, I sub out the chlorine for hydrogen and oxygen, which I know are safe because that’s what’s in water. It also helps keep my soup nice and warm whenever I sprinkle it in.

Eating sodium chloride is kind of insane. It would be like if you took my stuff and poured a bunch of hydrochloric acid on it and then sprinkled that all over your food. Yeah, no thanks.

How marketable would you say your illness was?

Your options would be: begging strangers on the internet for money and going viral, being rich enough to pay out the ass for really good insurance when you were healthy, declaring bankruptcy, and playing Luigi’s Mansion.

I appreciate you doing your part to fact check, but I invented that rule, and I always have the receipts. Don’t come for the king.

Case in point, the thread in question was removed, but I was able to find the relevant comment through the search function. A comment from Unruffled, reading:

If the community rules don’t ban GenAI images then you can assume a) they are allowed, and b) complaining about them is not allowed.

As a follow up, I asked, “Is there any way to get a list of .dbzero communities that do/don’t ban AI so that I don’t have to block your entire instance?” to which they replied, “Lol must keep your eyeballs pure eh?”, at which point I blocked the whole instance.

You’re free to ask Unruffled to clarify their stance or ask some other mod who might overrule them or whatever, but until you can show me a statement otherwise, I’m assuming that the rule is:

If the community rules don’t ban GenAI images then you can assume a) they are allowed, and b) complaining about them is not allowed.

Because that’s what I was very directly told.

Personally, I subscribe to “Live Internet Theory.” I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.

The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn’t otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it’s either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn’t post.

Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I’d rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest “Dead Internet Theory” types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don’t want to be like them.

We have a few communities regarding GenAI, but the opposite is the case: we had to implement a rule to stop external mass downvoting and brigading in those communities

It’s not “a few communities” it’s every community unless explicitly stated otherwise, according to the mods.

Immigration courts have always been kangaroo courts. For example, there’s no right to an attorney, and young children have been made to defend themselves against threat of deportation. That’s not due process by any stretch of the imagination.

To say “there was no accidental deportation of people there legally” is completely absurd. Are you suggesting that not a single immigration court ever made a single mistake?

The “disservice to everyone” is you trying to whitewash the system and pretending that courts that require 6 year olds to defend themselves with no council is somehow a legitimate, fair system, just because the orange man wasn’t the one in charge of it.

Here’s John Oliver talking about it.

US

My side should have guns, the other side shouldn’t. I don’t think it’s possible to generalize a principle beyond that, because policy should be adapted to specific conditions.

Currently, the right has tons of guns and the left doesn’t. Try to confiscate the right’s guns and you’ll probably have a civil war on your hands. So either add restrictions for new purchases, which locks in the current situation of only the right being armed, or don’t, and leave open the possibility of the left getting armed. So, better to have easy access to guns.

This sketch was about Facebook but it’s also relevant to Twitter

I like how in this analogy, republicans are Hitler and democrats are the guy who brought Hitler to power. Very apt.

Agree with your overall point, but a “revealed preference” isn’t necessarily a lie or lake of self-knowledge. A recovering alcoholic might have a revealed preference for alcohol but that doesn’t mean they’re lying when they say they don’t want it or that they’re unaware of the temptation they have for it (insane as this may sound, people have actually made this argument before). The whole economic concept rests on massive philosophical and psychological cans of worms about what defines a person’s identity and wants, which economists are happy to oversimplify and ignore. The average person can’t really be expected to track entire supply chains for every purchase they ever make, which is why we have regulations. Instead of having every individual track every part of the production of every purchase, we (as a society) assign someone the job of investigating the production process to see if there’s anything that we would find objectionable.

If a lot of people say that they have a problem with sweatshops, but then purchase goods made in sweatshops, you could argue that their behavior “reveals” their true preference, but it would be equally valid to say that what what they actually consciously express is their true preference and their failure to live up to it is driven by ignorance, succumbing to temptation, or regulatory failure.

It’s a staging area for the US that’s very close to China, so there’s that reason strategically. But really, there’s not a lot of reason to which is why they haven’t done so already. China is, as far as I’m aware, perfectly happy with the traditional US approach towards Taiwan, a policy of “strategic ambiguity” that doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan as independent (while informally supporting them) and which has kept the peace for many decades. China does not gain much from provoking a military confrontation with the US, as things stand, China is winning the peace through economic development while the US is going all in on the military. By maintaining the status quo, China can leave the issue open and kick the can down the road, maintaining the possibility that someday in the future they may be in a strong enough position to press the issue.

Even still, China now has its own academia and engineering, and is larger than Taiwan. Hence, even without the corporate espionage mainland China is known for, wouldn’t investing in their burgeoning semiconductor industry make more sense, rather than spending that money on war?

That’s exactly what they’ve been doing. That article mentions that they’ve actually recruited 3000 engineers from Taiwan’s chip industry to help develop their own chips.

Yet while taking Taiwan would mean access to deep-water ports, it’s not as though Taiwan would ever pose a threat to Chinese power projection—their stance is wholly defensive. If China decided to pull an “America” and send a carrier to the Middle East or something, no one would stop them and risk a war.

Taiwan’s stance is defensive, but the same isn’t necessarily true of the US, which operates in Taiwan. The US has recently started throwing around rhetoric and shifting spending focuses towards treating a hot war with China as a serious possibility, insane as it may be. This is (hopefully) just bluster to justify defense spending, but I’m not at all convinced that if China sent a carrier to the Middle East, the US would not retaliate. If anything, they’re looking for a reason.

So a handful of people grew consciences and decided that they didn’t like the Nazis, but what was actually done to them while they remained loyal, or to others who never turned against them? “Some people grew disillusioned” isn’t the same thing as the Nazis actively turning on them personally.

When the Nazis seized property, it was generally the property of minorities which was then often redistributed upwards to the rich. Many bourgeoisie made out like bandits, so long as they were white and didn’t have a conscience.

Like, just google what happens to most oligarchs when they support any kind of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin, they always get shafted in the end.

What on earth are you talking about? The oligarchs who supported Hitler made a bunch of money, saw organized labor crushed, and then did fine after the war. Nazi war criminal Fritz ter Meer, who was a senior board member of IG Farben, manufacturing Zyklon B for the gas chambers, got a couple years in prison and then became chairman of Bayer.

Trumps not wrong for once.

He’s definitely wrong morally, constitutionally, and strategically just not legally, per how the courts have (mis)interpreted the constitution.

Sanctions haven’t been working

Well, in order to work, they’d have to have a coherent objective.

They did work at bringing Iran to the negotiating table, which led to Obama’s Iran deal. The only problem being that Obama made it, so Trump had to hate it. The only thing the US actually wants from Iran is for it to be an enemy the president can bomb to look tough.

it should be effective at stopping their program.

The program that we have no evidence actually existed, that is. Certainly, if they weren’t actively persuing one before, they’d be mad not to now. How else could they stop the frequent, random unprovoked aggression from the US?

It’s sad because for most people school is about the only time anybody cares enough about your thoughts to actually read an essay and respond to it intelligently.

Exactly.

See also: Military Operations Other Than War, Low Intensity Conflicts, Police Action (e.g. Vietnam).

What are the democrats gonna do to them? They’ve got nothing to be afraid of, look what happened to Bush.