toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
6mo ago
Adversary reveals himself through his accusations
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
toadworrier
10mo ago
while roughly zero Americans can pronounce (or know about) "Tadeusz Kościuszko.")
Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
...
toadworrier
11mo ago
They are in somewhat of a win-win situation, because even if their constitution gets rejects, they'd be left with the status quo-which they'd be happy with. The main task for them is to get through it without somehow re-energising the opposition.
toadworrier
5mo ago
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst
Does Ireland's history mean that there's a population of such scumbags who are unusually competent and causing trouble?
toadworrier
5mo ago
Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value.
If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
toadworrier
10mo ago
They lose money, but not necessarily influence, as they can leverage the loss of money for concessions in other areas, such as Chinese access into other infrastructure or concessions to allow Chinese-only installations
This is what I thought the belt-and-road was for. Pretend loans, that are actually payments to buy influence. But no, apparently the Chinese actually ask for their money back, and do so much more insistently than the IMF etc.
I'm particularly familiar with Sri Lanka. That stuff you might have heard of about the place failng organic farming was BS. That nonsense was government copium because they couldn't buy fertilizer, because they ran out of dollars, because the Chinese had lost patience.
The result was that China's friends in power got literally run out of town while protesters jumped into the presidential swimming pool. The new president is nobody's friend, but is now going cap in hand to the IMF.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Their goal isn't to persuade or influence the cosmopolitan tribe its to cripple it and slowly destroy it.
This is a correct analysis, but Canada is far from that yet. The protests have not crippled Trudeauism, they have upped the ante. Trudeau abused his power at the time, and has now abused it again by standing up phonies to whitewash it. This game might end in failure if the next election replaces the regime with an angry and effective alternative. Or else it might just confirm that the regime's right to power is above Canadian democracy.
It could go either way, but I suspect the median Canadian voter prefers to sleepwalk into dictatorship. The denial tastes so good. That's on them, the truckers have done as well as anyone could.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Not wrong, but this could have been said, with equal truth at any time in the last 100 years.
Most of those civil servants are pretty ordinary centre-lefties. It is exceptional, and disturbing that an extremist is not only at high level but is so bold about it.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Indeed.
But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.
toadworrier
9mo ago
And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
toadworrier
9mo ago
I think Australia is a very unusual case, because for us, until Christmas '21, Covid suppression actually worked. This was because we closed the borders fast enough to keep the numbers at a level where test & trace was enough. Although we became lockdown poster-child, we were actually far more open for most of the time because there was simply no Covid around to suppress.
Then came the Delta wave, which we might or might not have got on top of with lockdowns and travel restirctions. But what we definiately did do was ruin Christmas, especially for those of us travelling to Queensland. And at just that time, Omnicron comes along knocking both Delta and Covid suppression sixes-at-will. The whole country just gave up, except for some idiots at the Saturday Paper who thought that politicians overruling public health bureaucrats was "the tail wagging the dog".
In other words, by luck or good management, Australians -- including the decision makers -- supported lockdowns when they worked and gave up on them when they stopped working. In other countries, the lockdowns never worked, but were still enforced (with public support) for at least as long as in Australia.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Suppose there were bands of brown-shirted (and presumably red hatted) thugs who were reputed to go around murdering enemies of the president. Obviously already illegal, no need for a new law.
Suppose members of the FBI etc occasionally met with the leadership of these gangs and there are transcripts saying how the feds mentioned that so-and-so is not a nice guy (but never actually asking for a hit of course). Then suppose there's a pattern of so-and-so's getting murdered by "unknown assailants".
Do you seriously think it would be unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law banning those meetings?
toadworrier
9mo ago
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.
Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.
Government speech is a whole explicit area of US jurisprudence which is probably over both our heads.
But however you categorise, an injunction preventing government agents from merely communicating with persons is a pretty big deal. But IMHO the judge go this right. The injunction is mostly a list of prohibitions like
[Youse fuckers are enjoined from]:
emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
My emphasis. So he is allowing the Government to communicate, but just not for the constitutionally forbidden purpose. Sounds reasonable.
toadworrier
10mo ago
The word appears twice in the poem:
I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Trump and his "body man" Waltine Nauta moved dozens of boxes containing records and documents (presumably including the classified documents at issue in this case)
And Nauta is being charged for conspiracy, because the invariant is always that the butler did it.
toadworrier
10mo ago
It's good for the soul.
toadworrier
11mo ago
the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).
So after all those betl-and-road-initiative projects failed, the Chinese want to lose more money and influence?
toadworrier
11mo ago
In Australia this is normal. Pale-skinned aboriginals are commonplace and to be found on both sides of politics. This is not really like Elizabeth Warren style fakery.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
toadworrier
5mo ago
police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.
This bit does sound like a historical holdover, since certain respectable political parties both north and south of the border have friends in interesting places.
toadworrier
9mo ago
you better aim to be really sick
But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.
I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.
toadworrier
9mo ago
OK so the law against conspiracy to murder is constitutional because murder is not lawful.
Whereas a law against conspiracy to ostracise is not, because it burdens the rights of those who are taking orders about whom to ostracise. How exactly does it do this?
It's one thing to say that ostracism itself is legal (which it is), or even protected by the 1st Amendment (which it isn't), but it's another thing to say that the conspiracy is protected.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.
Yes, there is in effect a lot of "caching and summarization" going on -- although that's probably our 2023 ooga-booga, not-quite-wrong way of talking about something else. LLMs really only have their context window and it's feedback as a short-term memory. Which is fine for text translation, but is asinine if you want anything like a thinking engine. Goldfish with a notebook.
We and LLMs can both compress long stories into gists, but the LLMs just forget about it and repeat the work on every iteration. We remember the gists and use them as context on every iteration.
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