This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”

I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.

I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

Republican House Candidate Posted IRA Cosplay Video The “gunfluencer” turned Texas Republican congressional candidate Brandon Herrera posted to YouTube a video in which he wears a balaclava, fires an Armalite rifle, uses Irish stereotypes while joking about the IRA, and says he “fucking hate[s] the British.”

“I’m not doing it because I like or support the IRA,” says Herrera, now 28 and a candidate for the Republican nomination in Texas’ 23rd U.S. House district, in the video posted on March 17, 2023—St Patrick’s Day—and titled “The AR-180: The IRA’s Lucky Charm.”

“They were pretty heavily socialist. Of course they really hurt a lot of innocent people sometimes. I’m not doing this video because I like the IRA or I support them. I’m doing this video because I fucking hate the British.

“Guys, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Mostly.”

On Tuesday, Herrera will face incumbent Tony Gonzales in a primary runoff.

Gonzalez, a U.S. Navy veteran, has represented the district, an agricultural swath of south-west Texas and parts of San Antonio, since 2021.

Texas 23 includes Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were shot dead in May 2022 at an elementary school.

Gonzales’ vote for gun control reform in the aftermath of the massacre has helped make him a target for far-right attacks. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona are among far-right members of Congress now supporting Herrera. The actor Matthew McConaughey is among figures supporting Gonzales.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Aidan McQuade, from Northern Ireland and a former director of Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights group, condemned Herrera for displaying “jaw-dropping stupidity” in his IRA-themed video.

“It is quite an achievement to make a video of which the anti-Irish stereotyping is the least offensive part,” McQuade said.

Other remarks by Herrera in the video include a promise to get “belligerently drunk” to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and, “The IRA [were] very famously unhappy for a certain group of folks going after their Lucky Charms,” a reference to famous ads for a U.S. breakfast cereal featuring a leprechaun character.

Over footage of a gun jamming, meanwhile, Herrera says: “This is why Ireland isn’t free.”

McQuade said: “From a historical perspective it is jaw-droppingly stupid to suggest that the course of the Troubles could have been changed with a more dependable Armalite.

“From a human perspective, Herrera’s attitude to violence seems that of an adolescent video-gamer blissfully ignorant of the trauma that war inflicts on a society, and the unending grief of victims’ devastated families.”

The Armalite assault rifle was an American gun that became synonymous with the Provisional Irish Republican Army or IRA, the dominant republican terror group during the Troubles, the period of violent unrest in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain from 1968 to 1998.

The accepted death toll from the Troubles, established in the book Lost Lives by authors David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea, is 3,720. The Provisional IRA killed more than 1,700 people–hundreds of them civilians. According to Ulster University, a college in Northern Ireland, more than 47,000 people were injured in shootings, bombings and other acts of violence.

McQuade grew up in South Armagh, on the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, during the Troubles, seeing violence close up. A former winner of the BBC’s Mastermind quiz show, answering questions about the Irish independence leader Michael Collins and the U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, McQuade is now an independent human rights consultant and the author of historical novels including Some Service to the State, set in 1925, an earlier period of Irish civil strife.

McQuade added: “Coming from a comedian, as Herrera attempts to be, such attitudes would be tiresome. But coming from someone who hopes to be an elected representative such callous and facile thinking is inexcusable.”

Also known as the AK Guy, Herrera has more than 3.4 million followers on YouTube. His videos have courted trouble before. Earlier this year, in response to a video in which Herrera fires a German World War II submachine gun (which he calls “the original ghetto blaster”) and goose-steps while an associate wears a German uniform, Gonzales branded his opponent a “known neo-Nazi.”

Herrera denied the charge, saying: “This is the death spiral ladies and gentlemen. He has to cry to his liberal friends about me, because Republicans won’t listen anymore.”

Herrera has also attracted criticism after joking about suicides among military veterans and previous links to neo-Confederate groups.

His IRA-themed video runs more than 19 minutes. It includes discussion and demonstrations of different versions of the Armalite rifle and is scored by a version of “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a rebel song attributed to the Irish writer Dominic Behan.

Herrera says: “Today’s topic for our range video is the AR-180, aka my little Armalite.”

“Little Armalite,” sometimes known as “My Little Armalite,” is another Irish rebel song.

Herrera’s campaign manager Kimmie Gonzalez responded to an email from The Daily Beast but did not offer comment on the video or McQuade’s response.

A representative for Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment.

Chris Harris, vice-president of communications for Giffords, a gun control group founded by Gabby Giffords, a former Democratic congresswoman who was shot and seriously wounded while in office, said: “Brandon Herrera is reckless and dangerous. He gleefully promotes violence and extremism.”

I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.

People like RFK, Jill Stein, and Cornel West run for president as a grift. I don’t know who the libertarian candidate is this year, but it’s the same deal. They raise money to a small degree from a handful of true believers (those those people usually can be conned into providing free/cheap labor), and mostly from donors who are looking to fund spoilers. In some swing states, it’s a game of inches, and even getting 3% voting for a third party candidate makes it a win for your candidate.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

I have no idea where the disconnect is. I don’t care that the paintings are by W, I’m pointing out that they’re amateurish and that if they weren’t by W they wouldn’t be exhibited. It has zero to do with my artistic judgement being informed by knowing the artist.

I don’t actually listen to MJ very often, although I do enjoy his music and appreciate his contributions to both music and dance. I do tend to avoid work by people like Weinstein, Spacey, and Joanne Rowling because I would prefer not to contribute even incrementally to their income or the perception of public support.

But in particular, as someone who does not believe in free will, I don’t believe in the idea of culpability. I believe that if you physically recreated W’s brain in perfect detail and put it into someone else, you’d get the exact same outputs to the exact same inputs. Even if you want to include some kind of randomness from quantum effects, that doesn’t make for free will, it’s just randomness. That’s the opposite of free will.

So although it might be a natural reaction from me to hate W or Trump or Hitler, I try to remind myself that it’s all neurophysiology and neurochemistry (plus other aspects of physiology) as informed by factors such as learning and genetics.I can pretty much guarantee that, were we to do neuroimaging on Trump’s brain, we’d find a hypertrophic amygdala and a hypotrophic prefrontal cortex. Simplifying a bit, you can think of those as the primitive fear center and the rational consideration parts of the brain. No one with that kind of neuroanatomy is going to behave in a rational and controlled manner, especially under stress.

I might hate the harm they cause and want to prevent it, but there’s no “self” inside of them for me to hate.

To be clear, I explicitly stated that I wasn’t saying it’s not art. It is art, and I am all for people embracing their creativity. I think more people should be painting/sculpting/playing music/etc., especially in retirement. What I’m saying is that as much as someone might get a kick out of playing Wonderwall doesn’t mean they should be getting a public concert at Epcot.

Although if I was in the neighborhood I’d probably pay $15 to see Dick Cheney play a self-taught version of Wonderwall if he was also singing.

I didn’t say “hang it on my fridge,” I said “hang it in my restaurant.” It’s not like a five year old, but it’s like a high school student. You can look at his paintings online and see how he developed over time.

I’m not discrediting it - I’m saying it doesn’t have great vision, great technique, or innovation. He’s been doing this for ten years, and he is still at the level of “That’s great! Keep practicing!”

It’s fine though. Painting is a great hobby. I don’t have a problem with him painting, and I don’t have a problem if his political loyalists want to imbue them with some value. I read a fun article from about a decade ago intentionally overanalyzing his shower-selfie painting.

What I am saying is that there is nothing special about his paintings except the fact that he’s the one who painted them. I’m not comparing W to Hitler, but Hitler’s paintings were also pretty bad, and the only reason why anyone looks at them today is because they were painted by Hitler.

I’m not going to say it’s not “art,” but this is basically the level of sophistication that parents get from their kid to hang in their diner. If this was actually painted by anyone who wasn’t the ex-president, it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone, much less exhibited.

There’s a tsunami of layoffs in the gaming community, and in tech in general. A lot of the time, it’s entirely unjustified as the positions being laid off are often quickly put on the market again, and it’s usually not the top engineering talent (the most expensive) because they’re harder to replace. It’s often focused on lower tier jobs/support teams, and the cost of re-filling a position (sourcing, interviewing, hiring, training) would far offset any kind of salary reduction. It’s like the tech management version of a Michael Scott vasectomy.

I wish someone would compile a list of companies acting in extraordinary bad faith so I could consider that when making purchase decisions.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.

What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.

Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?

Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.

So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.

Do Americans hate us? The only people I’ve been verbally and physically assaulted by have been Americans.

So are you saying that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians aren’t transphobic, or that we should go Gaza on Texas?

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.