domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
15hr ago
Laziest, sloppiest, slowest and least thorough genocide ever. I suspect the Gazans breed faster than the Israelis manage to kill them.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Huh? I could swear they're still making shortwave radios.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
15hr ago
Respectfully, isn't this just a refusal to employ conflict theory? I might be missing your point entirely because you don't really specify what you mean by "revenge narratives".
It seems entirely obvious to me that in an outright conflict between opposed groups, principle (i.e., mistake theory) doesn't need to enter the picture at all for "revenge" to make perfect sense. Revenge, as in a direct attack on the opponent's ability to wage the culture war, either by demonstrating that they cannot follow through on their promises, or that they are too weak to protect their confederates, or by eliminating their actors directly. But maybe I'm missing your point - direct culture warfare needn't be "revenge" for prior slights; one may also strike with initative.
I absolutely believe that in politics, the merits of a given idea are almost perfectly irrelevant. Especially in a representative democracy with elections every few years, where voters are memoriless idiots and politicans are necessarily sociopathic opportunists. The entire system selects for media impact, not merit. There is no mechanism for determining merit. Yes it looks good and virtuous when a principled individual takes the stage and makes his case, and we can nod along sagely, but when the chips are down and it comes to casting ballots, 9 out of 10 people will monkey-brain it and vote for whomever stuck in their memory as being on their tribal side.
I'm not saying that this is good or desirable, or that there is a better way, or that either side is wrong or right. Just...please acknowledge that there is an ongoing conflict, not just mistakes being made.
SkoomaDentist
15hr ago
maybe Motorola if you squint
Motorola hasn't existed for 17 years and spun off their cpu / microcontroller business back in 2004 to Freescale which was since acquired by NXP in 2015.
FtttG
16hr ago
I'm the worst potential audience in the world for "romantasy" (and believe me, Tonstant Weader Fwowed up when I learned this neologism) so I can't speak for the mass audience of women readers of such stuff.
But I think it's more about soft porn (as per the devolution of the Anita Blake series) than romantic attention, as having two or more supernatural beings lusting after your PI/Wiccan/half-Fae heroine means you can stuff in the adult scenes that publishers crave for page-turning appeal; you can describe the ravaging by the werewolf tech executive founder of the billion-dollar startup on pages sixteen to twenty, then go for the seduction by the vampire biker gang leader on pages thirty to thirty four, and maybe throw in some will they-won't they UST between your hard-boiled heroine and her on-again/off-again boyfriend who's a half-demon sorceror running his own rival paranormal detective agency sprinkled all through the novel (volume six of the fifteen - and growing! - volume Susie Superb, Witch Attorney series, on sale in every good bookstore now!)
See Laurell Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, where she completely lost the plot, as the main focus is "I gotta get pregnant so I need to bang every single hot guy I encounter". All this is for ostensibly magical purposes, so that's why she has to have sex with fairies, humans, every other supernatural being, etc., but that's only the figleaf for "and now here's sexual encounter number fifty-six".
EDIT: I think the main difference between men and women readers of erotica (shall we say) is that the guys will go straight for the Hawt Action without much need for justifying it, but women need a lead in (hence the establishing of the love-hate relationship between Hot Guy Numbers One Through Four and the heroine before they bang, or the Merry Gentry "The Goddess said we have to bang so we can get our old magic powers back. Yeah, it's a divine command, so strip now").
FtttG
16hr ago
HereAndGone
16hr ago
They both annoyed me, I think the anime even more because it's so horrible and is desecrating what remains of the corpse of public art. The video is "lower class criminals-in-training behave like such in public" which, unhappily, is too common to evoke more than "for feck's sake, where are the parents?"
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
16hr ago
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.
The last British King to rally the troops against his domestic political opponents was also called Charles, and ended his reign noticeably shorter than he began it. I don't think Charles III is going to be following his example.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
Seems he and his wife engage in philanthropy, and they founded the Ballmer Group in 2015 which both manages his wealth and is a grantmaker for liberal causes:
The Ballmer Group has also been involved in backing advocacy groups related to policies on criminal justice issues, including bail reform and expunging criminal records. It has also regularly spoken with lawmakers such as Karen Bass.
The Ballmer Group uses a "wraparound approach,” which emphasizes community action rather than being directly involved with educational issues such as K-12 personalized learning, academic standards, and curriculum. One of its largest donations was made to StriveTogether, a network of local communities helping children with economic mobility.
...In 2018, the Ballmer Group announced a $59 million, five-year investment in Social Solutions, a software company that tracks data related to nonprofit and government social service agencies. The Ballmer Group also donated $16 million to 18 nonprofits in southeast Michigan, including the American Heart Association and Planned Parenthood.
In 2022, the Ballmer Group donated to $425 million to the University of Oregon to create the Ballmer Institute for Children's Behavioral Health. It aimed to tackle mental health issues facing children.
In February 2023, the Ballmer Group stated it would provide commitments of up to $165 million to Communities in Schools to build 1,000 additional majority-low-income schools. In April 2023, the Ballmer Group provided $43 million to the state of Washington to increase the access to early childhood education. It also provided $38 million to the University of Washington to fund early childhood educator scholarships. In May 2023, the Ballmer Group stated it would provide $42.5 million over the next five years to support more than 100 Black-led nonprofits focused on improving economic mobility.
So yeah, getting persuaded into (or maybe it was his own idea) backing a media literacy initiative to snatch a brand from the burning by informing the Americans at risk of voting for Trump that this would be bad and wrong, here's the right information you should believe, sounds on-brand for the guy.
RenOS
something is wrong
16hr ago
I don't get this impression, at least not strongly. If anything, the people I know who have actually lived and/or spend multiple months in exotic countries are almost exclusively men. Maybe women do go a bit more often, but usually to more generic, touristy spots.
My experience matches Arjin's, in that travelling is just generically high status behaviour at the moment, and women tend to be much more receptive to signalling status behaviour. Also, everyone enjoys not having to work, and women tend to have less pressure on that front, so they can have a bit more leeway in how often and when they can go on trips.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr ago
Oh, thanks for the heads-up!
Tenaz
16hr ago
I feel like I need to tap in someone who is better at communication here, because clearly I'm not getting my point across.
It doesn't matter how closely your definition of God aligns with reality. That's totally irrelevant. I haven't even started making arguments about God's nature. We're still laying the groundwork here, or at least I'm trying to, but it's not working.
I'm trying to get you to concede that, where definition and reality conflict, reality should win out. If you can't concede that, then there is not even any theoretical amount of evidence that will convince you that your understanding of God is not both perfect and complete, and no point to this discussion.
This is why I opened with the question I did--if God himself were to tell you your definition of him is wrong, would you believe him? Or does your definition take precedence over his own words?
"In theory reality can never conflict with theory though!"
Yes, this is true of all theories, and yet reality conflicts with most of them.
I realize the hypothetical is a bit unfair--"If you were wrong, and knew you were wrong, would you accept defeat?"--but it's also certainly unfair for you to continue this discussion if your answer to that hypothetical is "no" as it seems to be.
Without the positive feedback of the classical conception of God, though, my spiritual life went nowhere. What does it matter if God isn't all that He is? If he's just like some alien dude who did everything in the Bible? That has no implications on who I am, what morality is, the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If He doesn't actually explain anything, if He's not actually the Summum Bonum? I'd be left with a cool role model but if I disagreed with His actions it's conceivable that my judgements are better than his. The Cool Role Model called God is just a potential tyrant.
What you're saying here is, "if my theological framework is wrong, then according to my theological framework, God would simply be a powerful alien."
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
16hr ago
I think we agree now. Overture isn't going to be transformative. If Concerto has another 20% better fuel efficiency per seat mile, a 5500nm range, and a low-boom design that allows Mach 1.7 flight over sparsely populated land areas (particularly most of CONUS and the Australian outback) then that probably would be transformative. But all of those are fighting basic physics - with the possible exception of the range they are not going to happen based on simple incremental improvements.
I like the idea of flying half the Overtures on a westbound RTW route, although you need to add a Singapore stop between Tokyo and Dubai (HND->DXB crosses too much densely populated land, including China which is not going to allow supersonic overflight by Americans, whereas HND->SGP is over water and SGP->DXB is over water if you do a small detour round India - also HND-SGP and SGP-DXB have better economics than HND->DXB). It also doesn't work with current airline business models.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
They leave shit loads of comments.
Definitely. All the "wow this is amazing" and "thanks for this, I loved it" comments under really terrible quality Youtube videos which are full of errors and AI-voiced, if not AI-generated? I mean, they could be real people who really think this is great, but bots have now replaced "hire people overseas for peanuts to leave positive comments and reviews on your garbage on all kinds of sites".
HereAndGone
16hr ago
I don't know much about the guy apart from recognising the name, but he seems to be leftish in his politics so probably a generic liberal who votes Democrat, and that is what the "just the facts for the citizens" initiative will be: did you know, dear hard-working American Joe or Jane, that the wicked misinformation and disinformation around [insert hot button topic of the moment] coming from the MAGA extremists is wrong and false and bad and yeah it might be technically true sometimes about some things but it's still bad and evil and you shouldn't be influenced by it?
Generally that's what I think as soon as I see the words "nonpartisan civic initiative" used about government or political material: oh, this is more Democratic PACs in action. Sometimes, they're Republican PACs.
FtttG
16hr ago
The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.
Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
Daily Record
This is a Scottish newspaper, so it's local rather than national, unlike The Sun or The Daily Mirror (and you get regional versions of those, e.g. The Irish Sun). A lot of the daily papers got hoovered up by the Murdoch behemoth and brought downmarket as tabloids to become profitable. Your question is a bit like asking "Why do you need the Minnesota Star-Tribune, isn't USA Today enough?"
RenOS
something is wrong
16hr ago
Somehow you replied to yourself on a completely different topic, as far as I can see?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
16hr ago
I don't have much to say about this, even though little girls and bladed weapons form a major part of my life. It's cute, I guess. The incident in the video I mean. As far as propaganda goes, we've seen so much that this is just background noise. And as for the AI image...okay? Doesn't really do much for me. I found the real video more interesting, though neither is worth much. Even the real one could be staged or manipulated. And even if real, what did we see? A girl screaming at the camera and briefly pulling out two things that might have been weapons (in someone elses hands). Girls do dumb shit all the time. Maybe this one wasn't dumb but actually heroic. But we don't know. How the hell would we be able to tell?
We live in an epistemic desert, where all information is mirages.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
16hr ago
the object level issue is too muddy to comment on until more information surfaces. Perhaps the teenager had sympathetic reasons for brandishing knives, perhaps she did not.
However, the general point in this case feels like a nothingburger. I don't think AI images are doing anything new. Before the advent of mass photography and telex, all pictures in newspapers, magazines and other contexts were illustrations, designed to evoke emotions yet supposed to illustrate real life events. Even with photography, many news photos have been intentionally staged to be evocative. During the past decade, meme texts, pictures and shopped photos have been cheaply available from 4chan. Only difference is that quality of freely available illustrations have been slightly upgraded, but it can be assumed the audience is soon desensitized.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
Since you don't give this option, I'll have to record "neither" as my answer here. The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?" In a slightly different context, this would be "little thugs attack ordinary person going about their business in broad daylight".
HereAndGone
16hr ago
And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.
Friend, if crappy bog-standard AI beige cartoons that are blinkin' well everywhere elicit strong reactions of sympathy from you, congratulations, you are Pavlov's dog.
Which probably is the entire problem in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.
Does anyone else hate that cartoony style because of over-exposure to it, even for 'serious' discussions of topics? I was about ready to throw a glass at the screen when Freddie deBoer used the crappy cartoony bastardised-Ghibli chibi of Joe Rogan, for pete's sake!
That's Motorola Mobility (subsidiary of Lenovo, smartphones and stuff) or Motorola Solutions (safety and security products). Neither have anything to do with IC manufacturing.
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