JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
10hr ago
The archive guys had some feud with Cloudflare for a while about some arcane details of how DNS resolution should work, which unfortunately resulted in some of their domains not being resolved properly on Cloudflare DNS. Maybe it's what still is happening.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
but I could imagine something similar for ICE.
Not the immigration branch of ICE though. It does have HSI branch that does investigations and asset forfeitures. Curiously, nobody gave a hoot about it until Trump. Trump has this peculiar quality that once he does something people start noticing how big the government is and how much abuse is possible - only to immediately forget it forever once it's not about Trump anymore. Example: https://archive.ph/QiXfH - this is from 2017. For the last 8 years, how much high profile public discussion did you hear about this? I'd assume "none at all" is not too far off the target.
you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.
If you want to go that road, you have plenty of targets beyond ICE. THe FBI itself, the ATF, the DEA, the NSA, not to speak of the leviathan in the room that is the CIA... I mean, operation Fast and Furious alone is a horrendous example, if Hollywood made a movie where a government agency forces US merchants to sell weapons to drug cartels, and then tries to prosecute them for it and use it as a basis for trying to kill the Second Amendment - people would say it's cartoonish, hammy and bordering on libel. Yet it happened, and people generally just let it slide, shrugged it off. And there are many examples on the same cartoonishly evil level. So is there a danger in a powerful government enforcement agency to go rogue? You betcha there is. Is there anything special in Trump financing immigration enforcement to increase this danger? You'd have to work a bit harder to establish any basis for it. I mean, if you have a hardcore libertarian credentials going back to 1960s on opposing any budget increase for federal law enforcement - ok, kudos for remaining consistent. If that's the first time when you're asking this question, I'd have much harder time taking it seriously.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Haaretz said it was 260 as of April 2024
That figure is probably correct. Haaretz is an extremely leftist publication which is very hostile to Likud government, and if that government went crazy enough (which it wouldn't because as I said that would be idiotic) to try and hide massive death toll, they'd expose it gladly. Except in this case there's nothing to expose.
Al-Jazeera said 860 five days ago
Al Jazeera is full of shit. And I mean it as the most general assessment possible, anytime they say anything about Israel you can assume they are full of shit and you will be right pretty much every time. If there ever is a conspiracy in Israel government, whatever it be, Haaretz can be plausibly the one that would uncover it (of course, given it's a Likud government, otherwise they'd just shut up, they wouldn't attack a leftist government), but not Al Jazeera.
How would they even do that? How many sources in top Israel government positions would leak to freaking Al Jazeera? Let's assume Israeli government and IDF and the Home Front Command and Hevra Kadisha and everybody else are all in on the conspiracy to hide hundreds or thousands of casualties. How the fucking Al Jazeera would know then? From where exactly? Who would tell them? When they have a at least half dozen of perfectly good media outlets in Israel itching to stick it to Bibi? Again, that would be completely idiotic. I like conspiracy theories but a conspiracy theory must make at least a minimal sense.
I don't know where Al Jazeera pulled that number from, and I wouldn't even bother to check. If you are interested in real numbers, get some from some place that isn't full of shit. You could use Haaretz if you want to - if they link to official figures, they usually wouldn't lie about it. Haaretz publishes a lot of lies, but lying about what could be easily checked against official figures would be too stupid, they don't work this way.
I’m sure you can tell me all the reasons those are wrong, but won’t actually be able to tell me a number.
I don't know the exact number, I haven't looked it up, so I'd estimate it as several dozens from Iran thing and about the same from Gaza activities, overall probably between 50 and 100 casualties in the last 3 months.
Did you try checking Wikipedia? While it's not the most reliable of sources, they have a habit that most traditional press neglects, that is linking to primary sources, and those links usually contain such information. I'm pretty sure every death in Israel, be it civilian or military, is reported (though military deaths are reported after a delay due to family notification requirements). You just need to look it up.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I am beginning to have doubts about Israel’s combat effectiveness in Gaza
Effectiveness is the function of goals - to evaluate effectiveness, you need to see how the goals are being reached. The problem is, Israel declared two goals here - elimination of Hamas and release of hostages, and these two goals are contradictory. Additionally, there's a longer term goal - not letting October 7 repeat itself - while also avoiding taking full control over Gaza as occupying power long term. This goal is also self-contradictory, since as soon as IDF moves out, Hamas moves back in.
inflicted enough civilian casualties to seriously impact its standing in the United States and the world
This has nothing to do with casualties. The Hamas caucus in the US has been screaming about genocide and singing "from the river to the sea" next day after October 7, long before there even were any casualties. And they will be always screaming that, because they do not recognize Israel as a legitimate state and their ultimate goal is its destruction, so nothing Israel does would ever be good enough for them, short of ceasing to exist completely. The slogan is "Free Palestine", and "free" here means "Judenfrei". It's not "reduce civilian casualties". It's "no Jews, period". They may be fine with some Naturei Karta posers, but that's about it.
I don’t think Israel has the manpower needed to fully occupy Gaza, clear the tunnels,
Israel has more then enough power to do that. What Israel doesn't have is the desire and political will to do that, because it replaces the current problems with much more complicated and painful set of problems, which Israel already experienced and decided to get rid of them by evacuating from Gaza. Israel wants Gaza to be outside and treat it as foreign thing, not a persistent festering sore on its own body. The problem here is that this desire is not matching the reality, and it's not the question of manpower. This is the problem of the political desires of Israeli society not matching the sad reality on the ground. And it will only be resolved, ultimately, by Israel giving up on one of the contradictory requirements. Previously, Israel gave up on security to get rid of Gaza, and got October 7 as the consequence. They can do it again and get it again in another 15 years or so. Or they can accept Gaza as their problem and get another set of problems instead. There's no other "solution" - at least not practical one. So yes, one could say it's not "going well" if somebody expected the contradictory requirements somehow be fulfilled. But it's going exactly as expected for somebody that understands the contradiction from the start. The IDF would do as much as the politics allow it, and then the politics will take over and go to one of the possible outcomes.
I cannot even find an official casualty count but the videos and individuals incident makes me think it could potentially be as high as 1200 dead and 10,000 wounded,
You mean on Israel's side? If you knew anything about Israeli society, this would be laughable, it's impossible to hide this many dead in a small country where literally everybody knows everybody within a couple of handshakes. I mean I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I actually know a thing or two about that country, having lived there for many years, and it's just not something that can happen. Hiding a couple of deaths would be tough, hiding a thousand is plain crazy talk. So I will address this no more.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I liked it... but I didn't enjoy it
That's Watts. I don't think his works are supposed to be enjoyed, unless you have a capacity of taking joy from existential dread and confusion about what anything ever even means. Like, I don't regret reading Watts, and probably will keep reading it if he writes more, but I am not sure I'd use the word enjoyed about it.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
It's more like if the alien life exists, and is intelligent, and had the means to get here it would operate on technology and energy scales that is completely beyond what we can even imagine how to operate. And if such beings are around we'd either all notice them very well and far beyond the occasional case of butt-probing a rural weirdo, or wouldn't notice them at all because they wouldn't want to destroy our fragile backwards culture by inadvertently stepping on us in so many ways. In other words, if it happened, it would happen in completely different way - thus, what is happening, if anything is happening at all, is not it.
Wait, what? Trump is distributing lands to ICE officers? Where?
Also, in Imperial Rome, the government - usually magistrates under the guidance of provincial governor - distributed the lands, and usually this was used to colonize the conquered lands. So how this dynamic is replicated? Is Trump personally giving ICE officers he likes the share in the vast riches confiscated from notoriously wealthy illegals? Is he giving them settlement on the lands that those people owned? Are they allowed to conquer Tijuana and settle there? In what part is the dynamic replicated? What is the mechanism inspiring personal loyalty and why this is not an argument against financing any part of the government then - if giving budget to ICE makes them Trump's personal army, then why giving budget to any other of the innumerable set of government agencies doesn't make them into sitting president's personal army?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Finished the Rhesus Chart from the Laundry Files. I am sure it were a lot funnier for me if I were a Brit, absent that it kinda feels the series are running out of steam. Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I am extremely skeptical at that claim. I mean, surely, if you examine LLM at what humans are usually examined at, things that are hard for humans - like perfectly recalling bits out of huge arrays of information - it would probably do pretty good. However, at things that human are never examined it - like common sense - because most humans that got through law school would have it, otherwise they'd fail out and probably be either institutionalized somehow or ejected from the society in some other way - LLMs are still terrible.
Just days ago I tried to use LLM advice to configure a scanner on my Mac. It managed to give me ton of advice that didn't work (because it kept hallucinating and confusing different Mac models) but then it managed to give an advice that seemed to work. I stupidly followed it. It broke my Mac completely. I decided to take hair of the dog approach and asked the same GPT for the fix advice. After another hour or so of hallucinating and meandering, it managed to make the problem worse. Then it had me to try a dozen or so non-working solution, each one ending with congratulating me on discovering yet another thing that doesn't work on my Mac - this despite me telling it upfront which Mac it is and it being aware to quote the exact source that says this wouldn't work - but only after suggesting to me repeatedly it would 100% work for sure. Eventually, it started suggesting to me deleting disk partitions and reinstalling the whole OS - while claiming this can't hurt my data in any way, everything would be OK - and I decided to call it quits. I tried to fix it using my wits alone and plain old internet search, and was able to do it in about 15 minutes.
This was a low risk activity - I actually had pretty recent backups and all important shit I have backed up in several places locally and online, so if it killed my Mac I maybe would lose some unimportant files and some time to re-configure the system, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe for me. Now imagine something like millions of dollars, or decades in jail, or the entire future of a person is on the line. Would I trust a machine that claims X exists and solves my problem only to cheerfully admit X never existed and even if it did, it couldn't solve my problem a minute later? Or would I trust a human that at least understands why such kind of behavior is unacceptable, in fact, that understands anything and isn't just a huge can of chopped up information fragments and a procedure of retrieving some of them that look like what I want to hear?
Sorry, I can't believe this "as good as a fresh graduate" thing. Maybe I can believe it's "as good as a fresh graduate on things that we check on fresh graduates because they are hard for fresh graduates so we want to make sure they are good" but that misses the obvious pitfall that things that are very easy for a fresh graduate - or any human - are very hard for it in turn.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
The whole concept of "getting your views" from a youtuber sounds quite bewildering to me. I mean, listening to, sure, thinking about some ideas they raise, definitely, agreeing with something, maybe, but "worldview"?
Also, I have no idea who the twitter is and who those blogger types are, but if you compare them to antifa types commonly featured in arrest reports or just plain regular report from places like Portland that gave up on arresting them, they look the normalest normal of the bunch by far. They don't even have blue hair!
JarJarJedi
8d ago
This btw is an extremely common failure mode in my opinion. You ask it to do something complex, and it builds a very nice way to do it, except there's one link in the chain that it completely invented out of the thin air. And it totally worked just like that if that link existed, except it does not. It could be an API method, a tool, a UI option, I've encountered a number of things - it all looks very neat, except for one detail that completely ruin the whole thing. And if you note about it, it cheerfully congratulates you on discovering it and even more cheerfully explains why it has always known this doesn't work and can't work. If a person kept doing this to me I'd be infuriated but you can't really blame a bunch of numbers.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Any task that can be described as "look up the thing which I describe, possibly in vague terms, among vast array of similar things, and bring it to me" is excellent for it. Using it as a search engine that understands natural language very frequently works. I use it multiple times a day this way and it helps a lot. Same for generating simple scripts that I know exactly what needs to be done, and maybe even have an example of doing similar thing but would have to spend 15-20 minutes tweaking it to do the other thing - it can give it to me in one minute. This is an awesome tool for such cases. But nowhere near "junior programmer" or "fresh law degree graduate" as some claim. At least if I had a junior like that on my team, I'd have a talk with the manager that hired him.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Yeah a bunch of that in Annihilation Score that I noticed. It felt especially weird given the author is actually a male. Like, is he white-knighting for his political agenda, or does he try to paint Mo as a whiny Karen for some reason? That's certainly not what I'd expect from a professionally successful woman who is a highly sought after demon fighter and literally the main character, to be constantly worried about.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation.
Yes, those are illegal aliens. If you are one, it's very much the time to prepare a plan B. And nobody made a secret of it since the beginning for Trump campaign, which is years from now - one of the major promises Trump made was to deport illegal aliens. He run the whole campaign on it. He never made a promise to revoke citizenship from existing citizens.
So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.
If that's what you want to do, don't let anybody to stop you. Some people prepare for alien invasion (the Mars kind, not the Guatemala kind), some for the rapture, who can forbid one to prepare for Trump revoking citizenships? I am just providing some data on how realistic this scenario actually is, where to take it from there is one's own business.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast
Used to be. But Gentleman Jole unfortunately has been like chewing cardboard. I understand why she wrote it, but can't recommend reading it to anyone. The Flowers of Vashnoi (the last work in the Vorverse for now, AFAIK, and probably for ever) is a little better but I wouldn't also go as far as calling it "a blast" - nowhere on the usual spectacular level.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
They might, but it still does not apply to anyone who already has the citizenship, and in fact anyone who has already been born. Moreover, SCOTUS already decided the government can not revoke a lawfully acquired citizenship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk so unless you voluntarily decide to denaturalize, Trump can't do much here.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Technically, maybe, but in common usage "dissident" is usually applied to someone who is persecuted by an oppressive, usually totalitarian, government, for their political views. Not somebody who is out of power because his policies and views disgust 99.9% of the population, but still is free to publicly proclaim and propagandize them.
It's like people claiming that since Arabs are Semitic people, opposing Hamas is "akshually anti-Semitic!" Yeah, no, that's not how it works, "akshually".
JarJarJedi
19d ago
That "interstate commerce" stuff has been going for a while now. I remember a case where a guy grew weed on his own backyard, and was prosecuted under "interstate commerce" with the logic somewhat like: if you grow it, then you would consume it or sell it. If you'd consume it, you wouldn't buy any other weed on the market, and if you sell it, you participate in the weed market. Since weed is sold and transported across the state lines, participating in the weed market influences interstate commerce, therefore the interstate commerce clause gives the state power to regulate what you grow on your own backyard and smoke in your own house. Yeah, it's nuts and nobody cares. Welcome to the clown world, we have cookies.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
That way of thinking easily leads to unbounded paranoia. Yes, Trump didn't issue an executive order to round up all foreign-born people into camps, but he might do it. Yes, SCOTUS made it pretty clear they don't like the government to revoke the citizenship retroactively, but they might change their minds. Yes, there's no official state-sanctioned cult of Trump The Divine with five daily kneeled prayers and mandatory floggings of non-citizens, but there might be. I mean, no known physical law forbids it, and even if they did, there might be new law discoveries that allow things that we consider impossible now.
You have to stop this somewhere, otherwise it will lead you into madness. Worrying about things that might happen if the world became completely unlike the world we're living in now is not the way to live in the world we're living in now.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
How often does everyone here wash their cars?
That depends a lot on where you live and how you use it. In the summer in place where it never rains you can get away with pretty much never washing it. In winter, especially if you drive in the snow, it gets filthy really quick. I usually go to a wash when I notice visible dirt on it, and usually just a run in automatic wash is enough. Occasionally when I take a longer trip (those darn bugs) I have to manually clean it with a rag pre and post the automatic part. Never found any special ritual meaning in it, it's just a chore for me.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
He has a lot of weird things, but how many people exactly got a free run for several months to try and reform US government? I mean, this is a gargantuan task, and Musk if probably severely deluded if he thinks he can accomplish it under the power of his own personal will alone, but how many people actually got at least as far as he did? How many people have managed to kill a $50 billion US federal government agency? How many people could actually get the power to audit Social Security and Treasury money flows? I mean not talk for 30 years about how we need to audit this and that, but actually get access to the freakin data?
He is weird, and he does weird things, and some of the weird things maybe impede his success, but I think he's a pretty "powerful thing" as he is already.
No, the Congress didn't declare any wars since 1942. That doesn't make your false claim any more true. And the fact that you are using the same fallacious logic as Democrat propaganda instructs you to use is a good confirmation Democrats did deploy an opposition to Trump's actions, and this opposition is quite effective - people are now thinking, completely contrary to the facts, that Trump "launched an illegal war". That didn't happen by itself, they made it happen.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.
I don't think it's how it works. See for yourself: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/
Specifically section 2(b):
(b) Subsection (a) of this section shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order.
I don't know when exactly have you been born, but I assume it was before February 2025, right?
You present this as an inconsistency, but it's actually two sides of the same system. Just like many other liberal dreams, the "minimal wage" system is only sustainable because it's not being consistently followed, but the parts that do not follow it are being hidden. So where it works nicely - i.e. some people getting more money from it - is is praised and lauded as "living wage", but where it requires a class of people living outside the law and subjected to all kinds of abuse, and where it makes such abuse the only possible way to conduct business, because you can't make your legal business compete on equal terms with a business that gets away with paying half as much to their workers illegally - this part is forgotten. The moral high horse standing of "living wage" can only ever stand on the basis of illegals being what they are now - because if they were inside the law and paid "living wages" and legal benefits too, the whole charade would collapse. The hypocrisy of the situation is by design. That's the thing that needs to be exposed over and over here.
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