domain:academic.oup.com
What do you think of when I show you this image?
If you were paying attention to The News at the time, then you'd recognize this image captures important social commentary. It was disseminated by our very best, professional national media outlets. Attached to it was a story about a MAGA chud laughing in the face of a noble and indigenous savage. The media manufactured and corralled the narrative in less than a day. Full blast an hour or so before I knew the entire encounter available for viewing on Youtube. This was not much slower than the Twitter story of the mysteriously well armed (for Britain) chav(?) teen that is alleged to be warding off Pakistani Asian advances. Alternatively, a teenager making poor decisions.
I don't think the AI connection is very relevant here. You can argue the image generation enhances the meme, but I don't think it is central. The video is enough. To take off it requires a common understanding and a major demand. There's a lot of demand on Yookay Twitter. I judge that the demand can be largely laid at the feet of British institutions and culture which are paying a cost for past transgressions. You may judge differently. This does not absolve propaganda for feel mads or Twitter bucks.
My brain short circuits a little seeing a girl dual-wielding hatchet knife in public. That is not a situation that organically transpires. About the closest thing I can map it to is various criminal situations in lower-class environments filmed for entertainment.
I look forward to more information than five sentences in the Daily Record. Why do you lot need so many tabloids and why do they need to be daily? The Weekly World News is a world class tabloid.
I do mostly mean LandSpace with Zhuque-2/3, and Space Epoch's Yuanxingzhe-1. Yes, I assume that these designs will be almost fully preserved in product version. They are better than Falcon-9 in that F9 is pretty old, and they're copying Starship as well. Methalox, steel body, more robust build (F9 diameter was limited by stupid American railroad/highway standard). This has the potential for rapid reusability and mass production. And you don't need to scale to Starship if you can scale to dozens of vehicles instead. I've heard that LandSpace may get facilities currently involved in metalworking for military aviation.
Long March 9,
I am completely jaded about the Long March program and it isn't factoring into my estimates. Robin Li was wise to insist on liberalizing the space market to enable those private efforts, they will determine Chinese ceiling.
raakaa
18hr ago
A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war
I honestly don't know what you're objecting to here, if you're objecting to anything. A part of me wants to go on a Fruck-eque diatrabe, but his point seems so obvious that I feel like I must be missing something about yours.
Please confirm that you believe that this meme, which you yourself admit does not even pretend to be real, represents some novel danger to the truth, which we haven't faced already on a much larger scale.
I don't think the Intel deal ties into the revenge narrative except insofar as Trump's supporters have extended him near-infinite deference in exchange for promises of vengeance against the libs. (More generally, the fact that conservative voters tend to be more tribal and less ideological gives the Big Men a lot more freedom to act out of bounds)
Tiber727
18hr ago
He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers.
I disagree with your assessment, much as I disagree with your assessment about Fox News. Democrats certainly wouldn't work to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good. I don't think working with another government to imprison them without trial is a Democratic position. I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position. I don't think "piss away our international relations to strongarm trade deficits" is a Democratic position, even if Democrats are sometimes protectionist.
Remember the case of Gina Carano?
Yes, I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available and not as uncommonly used historically as you might think.
But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
In the Soviet Union, the terror originates from the government. They effectively set the background level of terror and the punishment for not complying. Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire. There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough. The dynamics are very different. One is a group with a goal. The other is a culture of social media frying everyone's brains. And how they must be cured is very different. The latter I think can be accomplished by getting everyone to chill the fuck out, which I think will happen when the left cries wolf too many times and people stop caring, and I think the Democrat's unpopularity and Gen Z shifting right is a sign that it may be happening.
Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government, and in order to fulfill that goal it requires giving the government power it does not and should not have.
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies.
Multiple people in this thread are saying almost verbatim what I just said.
Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce por[n] to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi.
There's a mix of things I agree with and things I think are mischaracterizations.
- introduce porn to kids in kindergarten
I think the left is going too far with this, but I don't think all sex ed is porn.
- whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist
Agree with you on this, even though you did frame it in a way to sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
- that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism
"That alleging someone is a violent gang member and knowingly sending them somewhere they will be imprisoned without trial is bad"
- that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool
Missing context on this one.
- we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated
"cities burned down" is more like "some property destroyed during a mass protest." Which is bad but it's like calling the death of 5 people a genocide.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them.
This is the classic "I sanewash my allies and nutpick my enemies" framing. Yes, there are absolutely people for whom this is true. There are people for whom this is not. For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed? I browse /r/legaladvice and you do get threads like "my landlord is trying to make me take down my pride flag" or a woman at a Christian school fired for being pregnant out of wedlock (with a man who works there and is not being punished).
I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so
Fellow serial breaker of Overton windows here, and can confirm; I’ve gotten a slew of these insults myself. Most of them I’ve forgotten by now, but one that really sticks in my mind is the time I was called an “incest porn aficionado who roofies women”. I mean fucking Christ lol.
Hell it’s quite noticeable how much even the more charitable descriptions of me conflict with how I actually act. I imagine most of these people would likely find me to be rather good-natured in real life.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
18hr ago
You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned.
No, the way I would object would be to remember the last ten years of mainstream media and laugh at your concerns about propaganda until I hyperventilated.
You are right, it is an asymmetric weapon. And the establishment want to keep it that way. So it doesn't matter that explicitly government backed propaganda was used to protect migrants who raped little British girls, or to cover up said rape of little British girls, or to protect the people who covered up the rape of little British girls. It doesn't matter that slightly less explicitly government backed propaganda has been used in the decade since to paint the 'migrants' as scared women and children fleeing tyranny and to defame and punish anyone who doesn't like them. It doesn't matter that government propaganda hid nigh constant protests in France for years, or was used to defame a presidential candidate, to censor social media, to protect corrupt and incompetent politicians, to launder public support for useless and pointless wars, to hide the intel agency to big tech pipeline, to convince everyone to fear their neighbours and cripple childhood development and wear a stupid fucking mask/not wear a stupid fucking mask and give up their bodily autonomy in the name of self righteousness. What matters is that Tommy fucking Robinson can whip up a meme in ten seconds. That's when propaganda is dangerous.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18hr ago
Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.
Actually, yes it is. Kamala Harris was fully on board with ethnic cleansing of brown people, and so committed to it that she preferred supporting wiping out the Palestinians to actually winning the election. Hell, even AOC voted for more weapons and bombs! Extermination of unwelcome minorities is very squarely and firmly in the overton window right now thanks to what's happening in Gaza.
I think it does demonstrate that people are starved for a heroic/mythic figure to rally around or organize under and to inspire them to collective action towards some (ideally) righteous goal.
We're really short on such people these days. No politicians really live up to their own hype. Trump's reality warping field is strong enough that people DO find him inspiring. But he is simply not a 'leader of men' in the sense that one can't imagine him at the front of a cavalry charge on a battlefield or marching into a conquered city to personally accept terms of surrender.
Unlike, say, George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.
Made all the worse in the U.K. which has a literal king who has a literal sword and in theory has the ability to deploy the military inside and outside the kingdom.
But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.
And so, the right is really groping around for ANY figure that could possibly rouse their tribe to war and actually hold the coalition together long enough to rout the hated enemy. And they grasp upon a 13-14 year old girl with behavioral issues as their long-awaited queen.
And hey, the U.S. does it too. Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Shiloh Hendrix... just 'normal' people who happened to pull off a 'win' in a very specific place and time, and weather the onslaught of publicity and scrutiny, and did something that lefties really didn't like.
They get elevated to the status of 'heroes' but man, they pretty much fade out once it is clear they don't have the chops for maintaining the spotlight, much less being the core of a movement. And who does? Who can you actually imagine being dynamic enough to challenge existing power structures, stable enough to not fall to personal scandal, and somehow also strategic enough to win meaningful, repeated victories when it counts.
AI is good for creating imagery from that slightly-more-idealized world you wish you lived in. I do it pretty often, to create a vision of the future that I find appealing and would like to live in/escape to. But I try not to very directly make alternate versions of the present, especially one that supposes people or individual persons are different than who they really are.
That is, I don't want my actual perception and memory of reality to be supplanted by a version that I prefer but that simply isn't correlated with the truth. Believing the true things even when you'd prefer the true things be something else means NOT believing the false things even when they are exactly what you would prefer be true.
No. A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war, no Trump is NOT a divine instrument of retributive justice who also has six pack abs and a ten inch penis (he does alright, regardless, mind), no Zelenskyy is not some genius defensive strategist who can beat back Russian invasion via sheer grit and guile (and billions of dollars of aid and western weapons), no Luigi Mangione is NOT an avenging Saint, so on and so forth.
But people do, really really do, want that idealized version to be real and true, which is probably why they're ready to accept the digital fictions so readily. Which spells very, very bad things for our shared epistemic environment.
Evo-psych makes a bad turn when it tries to explain behaviors this specific. It's a sign of status, simple as (which can flip valance depending on the time period and conditions, like being tanned vs. being pale). The costs and the planning are a part of the point, as they gatekeep those that can't afford it.
oats_son
19hr ago
I'm sure you all are tired of evo-psych stuff, but why do women like to travel so much? I think traveling to a different country would be kinda cool but I'm really not as crazy about it as most women seem to be. To me, there's other higher priority things that don't cost so much and don't require a ton of planning.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
What? They weren't even attempting to reach orbit with this one.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10
Starship completed a full-duration ascent burn and achieved its planned velocity, successfully putting it on a suborbital trajectory.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
19hr ago
Great timing on the tag, it looks like they made orbit tonight. https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1960179929204596907
Thanks for the bet, I have to admit I was sweating a bit by launch 10. Happy to discuss but as I understand it landing in a stable orbit was the main bet.
Glassnoser
19hr ago
I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?
The difference is that the emergency fund is something you feel the need to separate from your regular savings and refill by spending much less money while you do so. If you were spending your regular savings, you wouldn't let having to buy a new car change what you else you spend. The cost would be spread over decades or even generations.
Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.
I don't know what you mean by being liable for depreciation.
There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.
But less than the expected rate of return of the S&P 500.
If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)
This is higher than I would expect. I just got a call from a car dealer offering me about 4%. Maybe that's with insurance. This makes little sense. I can borrow at about 8% I believe from my unsecured line of credit. Why would the interest rate on a car, which is secured loan, be higher than that?
If interest rates are really that high, then maybe it's a bad idea to lease, but still, I don't see the logic in eating rice and beans for six months to recover the expense. You can spread it over your lifetime by just having less savings.
It's a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov. But I can elaborate of course.
Pragmatists like Willard Van Orman Quine hold that language is not reality but a model of reality, which makes any logically constructed principle or ideology an inherently imperfect tool to observe, predict and interact with the world.
Principles are a map of morality rather than its territory, insofar as one regards morality to be an inherent property of the world rather than a logically constructed proposition in itself (but then that that opens itself to Nietzschean skepticism).
Correct conduct may therefore be at odds with what is logically prescribed by principle in the real world. We most often call this "paradox".
Well known examples of this often quoted in this utilitarian neighborhood include the mere addition paradox or the paradox of hedonism. But this imperfection is a general property of all theories, not just moral or political ones.
Hence, any reasonable political actor, who actually has to enact his moral ideas in this imperfect real world may have to encounter the difficulties of his ideological framework when confronted with the real workings of the world, and if he is to succeed he will have to make compromises. After immediate collectivization failed, Lenin enacted the NEP even though it's totally against Marxist principles in theory. Yet can we really say that Lenin was not a Marxist?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
20hr ago
From Merriam-Webster:
sucker
5.a : a person easily cheated or deceived
From Oxford:
sucker noun
(informal) a person who is easily tricked or persuaded to do something
I think my usage is perfectly appropriate. But it's not like I've made a mystery of what I meant. You certainly seem to have understood it.
The police haven't outlined any of the circumstances around the video such as was the foreigner harassing the girls. The will likely keep details to a minimum using the excuse of privacy for the minor.
Without clarifying that the girl was casually carrying the weapons before having met the foreigner, the situation is going to be memed into 'Scottish Boudica defends herself against the foreigner; where are the men?' I know this because this is currently being talked about on /pol/
Edit: There is also a shitshow of a thread on the scotland subreddit where you can expect usual reddit takes.
2D3D
21hr ago
Which just invites the question of why the left isnt using the same weapon against the right. Make its own cartoon memes of how bad things really are for the poor migrants and refugees and oppressed BIPOC.
Why, it may just be that the language wielding elite prefer to wage war on their turf where they can use vague words to shape perceptions using the moral weight of such words asymetrically. Refugee, child migrant, trans children, urban youth, journalist, UN worker. All these terms elicit a mental approximate closer to the stock image photo of what a sympathetic portrayal for such looks like, usually a prepubescent child eyes full of wonder or a do gooder westerner in squalid conditions with a heart full of hope and a belly full of vigor.
Maybe the push from leftist media to scrub images and videos of what happens on the ground is entirely because the definitional warfare breaks under reality and repeated evidence of "17 year old" of certain demographics being statistically overrepresented starts making Noticing more common. Worse if the left tries to pretend something is the inverse, like when Rittenhouse was portrayed as killing Blacks to supercharge the narrative of white nationalism running unchecked.
The Left can't use the low hanging fruit of visual art to its cause, a fruit plucked only by Ben Garrison or Stonetoss in the past but now accessible to every angry person with an internet connection. The meta is shifting, and its not in the favour of the left.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
21hr ago
but Ghibli is a dead giveaway . The concern over fakes is that they are subtly indistinguishable from a real-life event or the original image (e.g. slightly slurring someone's speech to convey inebriation) . Those examples you give are obvious fakes. Those fakes go viral for the novelty factor, not because people are confused or are mislead. Also, those are based off of photos, so there is no artist.
HeimrArnadalr
English Supremacist
21hr ago
When they do fuckery like the examples I'll provide below nobody has any recourse unless they randomly manage to fuck up the CEO's healthcare or something.
Or if they manage to fuck of the CEO of healthcare.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
21hr ago
yes it has that shitty Ghibbi style or whatever it is called with the obvious sepia background. it's not even good animation
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
21hr ago
The video is real , but what was the sequence of events that led to her brandishing those weapons .It's not like people carry axes when they go walking. were they just on the ground lying there or something.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
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Standard American redneck brand loyalty. One guy is convinced that Jeep makes reliable vehicles, like the grand Cherokee.
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there's a guy who literally didn't believe in oil changes. He has bought a long series of PoS $3k cars that all inevitably quickly break down irreparably within a year or two. Oil changes are a ripoff! The mechanic just wants you to throw away good money for no reason because the car is going to break down in a year or two anyway!
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On the opposite end, some truly poorly modified civics and f150s
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Some awful and idiotic ways to rip off your insurance company or auto repair shops.
He also wrote one of the better paraphrases of the New Testament.
For a while now, I’ve had this idea of collecting different translations of the New Testament, and lumping them together by author. Phillips for the letters of Paul along with Acts and Luke, ESV for the letters and the gospel of John, HCSB for Hebrews and Matthew, and NLT for Mark and the letters of Peter. Go for anthology vibes.
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