banned
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
People are allowed to draw unpleasant comparisons between arguments made here and arguments made elsewhere. Even if you or I think those comparisons are obviously wrong, we do not mod people for being obviously wrong because being obviously wrong is not against the rules. "paraphrasing uncharitably", "straw-manning", and generally putting extremely repugnant words in other peoples' mouths is very explicitly against the rules.
They've already been warned about deleting top-level posts, their excuses were rejected, and if they continue to do it they will be banned.
No part of this interaction involves anything resembling "affirmative action."
FistfullOfCrows
3mo ago
Ian Carroll is controlled oppo, he's def some kind of glowie, he was being pushed on me on youtube/facebook and even 4chan. In exactly the ways other people get shadow banned for even smirking about cookie baking math, this guy was being pushed by the algo. Just looking at his mug makes me close the tab.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I appreciate the feedback. So here's my take, and I will plead with you and @SteveAgain and all the other critics to actually read what I say.
First, regarding @justawoman. You say we ignored "very obvious bait." I told her I did not like the performative "quitting" and that we weren't going to delete her account for her. Beyond that, please be specific: what actions do you think we should have taken? Should I have banned her for that post? Being obnoxious about how you're going to take your toys and go home is cause to be told to leave or stop with the theatrics, which is what I did. When people keep doing the same obnoxious schtick over and over, eventually yes, they will be told they'll get banned if they keep it up. (That's why I modded @SteveAgain; the first time you say "Oh, I see you're letting leftists get away with everything," we'll patiently point out how you are mistaken. The tenth time, we're getting fed up. He was not modded for that sort of ankle-biting the first few times.)
More bluntly, I find the (rather visible) pity/condescension towards leftist unpopular points of view distasteful for a powermod
As an aside, what do you mean by "powermod"? Because the only powermod here is Zorba. If I am more visible, it's just because I am more active, not because I have more authority than any other mod. I suppose de facto that does give me more authority, but I just want to clarify, if you were under the impression that I am "in charge" of modding, that I am not.
As to your point: when I said "doing a good job," I did not mean I find her arguments particularly compelling or convincing. (And as another aside to @justawoman, at the risk of being accused again of being "pitying/condescending," that I'm sorry you're the example under discussion here, it's not meant to call you out.) I meant that she is clearly very woke and very feminist and willing to stand by her opinions despite being dogpiled and downvoted heavily. That takes a certain amount of determination. I am less impressed by the repeated threats to leave because we're such a hive of scum and villainy, but I really do hope she sticks around because some diversity in viewpoints is good. It was not meant to be pitying or condescending. I was being as polite as I can be given that I don't actually agree with her much, and that as you have demonstrated, any expression of personal opinion by a mod is given disproportionate weight.
As I understand you're trying to keep it balanced as all things should be or something, but this is exactly how you get the affirmative action accusations.
This isn't entirely correct. We aren't trying to keep it "balanced," we're trying to keep it fair. @justawoman has in fact been warned (with mod hat!) several times. She is not getting extra slack for being a leftist. Was I maybe a little nicer to her than I would be to a rightist throwing a temper tantrum? Possibly, but rightists who throw temper tantrums usually do so because they really want to hate on their enemies and they're pissed off that we don't just let them do that. I plead guilty as charged to being less sympathetic to that.
The second instance here is, well... I won't deny that @jeroboam's post is against the rules, but considering that he was rather obviously baited in a much less subtle way (really, argumentum ad Hitlerum in current_year?), I think a "proper" modhat warning would've more than sufficed, especially seeing as the bait itself remains unnoticed.
So with regard to @upsidedownmotter - as I said, he has been warned about his behavior. But as for that specific post? My personal opinion is that:
The right-wing rehabilitation of South Africa bears a resemblance to the rehabilitation of Hitler among some on the right.
is not exactly a detailed or high quality argument, but other than disagreeing with it (and/or being pissed off that you disagree) what rule do you think is broken? He added all the caveats we expect people to add when they want to make an assertion about their outgroup. Argumentum ad Hitlerum is obnoxious, you're right! But it is not in itself against the rules. If you think comparing rehabilitation of South Africa and apartheid to rehabilitation of Hitler is a bad argument, that is what the Motte is for: to advance (potentially bad) arguments and be tested against those who disagree. I am not being rhetorical: on what grounds do you think that argument should be prohibited? We do not prohibit bad arguments!
Notably, both posts were downvoted to hell - I hesitate to point this out, seeing as nobody likes getting dogpiled and updoot total isn't a very reliable metric (certainly a very gameable one), plus as you note downthread we're not a democracy so by itself this means jack shit. Still, it might serve as a very rough approximation of community reception when/if you ponder if it really is the children who are wrong.
Being downvoted to hell is a good indicator that a post presents an argument badly. It is less of a good indicator that it's a post that breaks the rules. A lot of people really don't seem to understand that crappy arguments are not inherently against the rules, and that failure to mod someone for them does not mean the mods agree with them.
For example: "Trans women are women!" is a post that would almost certainly draw a lot of reports for "Inflammatory claim without evidence" or "Consensus-building." But it is not actually against the rules for someone to assert that if that's what they believe. If you posted it as a one-liner, I'd probably warn you that it's low effort and you actually need to make an argument, not just assert things. But saying something that is very unpopular, pisses people off, (and that I personally disagree with) is not against the rules.
To repeat the obvious, which I have futilely pointed out many times: when someone posts a bad argument, and you reply with a personal attack against the poster and I mod you, that does not mean I agree with the OP or think their argument was good! It means that someone writing a bad argument does not mean the rules don't apply to responses.
This is why, incidentally, we have people regularly posting about how the Holocaust is a hoax and everything is the fault of Jews and not getting banned. Despite being reported a lot. Sometimes they get modded when they become too heated or get too broad in their generalizations about Jews- and we get criticisms that we're just protecting Jews and trying to ban wrongthink. I recently went back and forth with @DecaDeciHuman about this. He repeatedly claimed that we have banned "certain viewpoints" but won't tell us what those viewpoints are.
Can you see how exchanges like this, or attacks by the likes of @SteveAgain, who ignores every time I respond to him at length as I am doing with you now, make me more skeptical of people who earnestly insist that they really believe we (or I) are biased and not actually listening to feedback?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS
°
Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS"
Even the obviously hostile second hand source written to gin up fear about lenacapavir possibly maybe potentially being banned by Kennedy you found for your smear by association admits that Kennedy believes HIV is a cause of AIDS.
Kennedy is doing the same skeptic thing he's been doing for years, on a variety of topics. I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think he is ever going to learn that skepticism is evil and dangerous and bad and killing people. He's too much of a monster, I mean he literally growls instead of speaking.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
He's been warned to stop deleting posts or he'll be banned.
And you've been warned to stop goading mods and making things up. The last few times we've let pass, but the ankle-biting will stop. Now.
Shrike
3mo ago
I'm pretty sympathetic to your position here, but there's some things I think need to be parsed out.
The only actual NATO offensive action was Yugoslavia, and even that was telegraphed far in advance, was explicitly humanitarian in an already-war situation, so I fail to see how it would ever serve as a template for Russia to be worried.
Can't all of this be said of the invasion of Ukraine? Russia surrounded Ukraine and sent ultimatums demanding that Ukraine be banned from NATO, and then when they were rebuffed it launched a military operation, claiming it was staging a humanitarian intervention in an already war-torn land...and I think it's pretty reasonable for Russia's neighbors to be worried, honestly! But by the same token I don't think handwaving Yugoslavia really assuages Russia's concerns about the potential for NATO to be turned against them and their allies, especially since intervening there was arguably a violation of the NATO charter and NATO did it regardless.
Similarly, missile defense systems being deployed in Poland, etc. are I think a little more understandable
Let's talk about this a bit. AEGIS Ashore (which was deployed in Romania) uses the SM-3 in a land-based VLS cell.
Guess what also uses VLS cells? The Tomahawk surface-to-surface cruise missile. That should have made AEGIS Ashore illegal under the INF treaty in my reading, but as I understand it, the US brushed off the concerns with "well we've made it so that it won't accept the Tomahawk" - I'm not really sure how the Russians are supposed to be able to verify this. At any rate, the US pulled out of the INF (which was the right thing to do) so it's a moot point now, but at the time I think the Russians were technically correct to find it fishy (of course they likely violated the INF themselves, so, even if it was "in response," they arguably lose the right to persuasively complain about it.)
Anyway, let's set aside the Tomahawk, guess what has a secondary surface attack mode? Any missile, in theory (the Russians engaged a number of surface targets with S-300 surface-to-air missiles during the ongoing war). So the Russians were possibly, based on what I've read, not just worried about the destabilizing nature of a missile shield in their backyard, they were also concerned that the Americans were putting a launcher under their nose to conduct a decapitation first strike. The Russians are touchy about that sort of thing (there allegedly was a touch-and-go Nuclear Suitcase moment under Yeltsin because the Scandinavians sent up a single civilian rocket that the Russians were unaware of, and the Russians thought it might be a first strike, since a single launch first strike was one of their scenarios.)
PERSONALLY I think that the Russians are overly neurotic about this stuff because we can probably put SSGNs just about wherever we want and fire Tomahawks anyway, but it's probably worth understanding that to the Russians "putting BMD in Romania" and "putting ballistic missiles in Romania" may trigger an "it's the same picture" response and I don't think the US going "nah trust me brah" is very persuasive.
Georgia 2008 absolutely must be mentioned
It might be worth mentioning that the EU's independent report determined Georgia started said war.
basednerd
3mo ago
I think the biggest problem the Democrats have is that they don't understand their enemies. If you go on reddit, they think that the average conservative is a fan of Andrew Tate. I've actually basically been banned because my karma got so low from pointing out how ridiculous it is that the average conservative would support a black Muslim pimp who pimps out white women. Reddit can be excused a but because they skew young and are extremely online, but I've seen older Democrats in the MSM think the same thing. So they basically have no understanding of why and to whom they actually lost.
Their other big problem is that they don't want to represent what America is but instead what they want it to be. They obviously aren't stupid enough to not see what policy positions they need to take to win, but they still refuse to do it. So clearly, representing the will of the people and giving them the government they want is not their number one goal.
Last thing is DEI sucks. I've seen DEI hires get trusted to do things they clearly aren't capable of doing and mess things up. Then, real hires have to come in and fix the job. Of course, once the DEI hire has ben exposed as incompetent, they never actually get rid of them. So you end up with a bunch of useless people collecting paychecks. Everyone except those whose paycheck depends on the DEI grift continuing can see this, so this is a huge loss for them as well.
There are other issues too like how female-coded the Democrats are, and when you add it all together, the Democrats are incapable of changing. I'm not saying they are purposely losing or are too stupid to change. What I'm saying is as constructed, they are literally incapable of changing enough to do what they need to win. How could they ditch DEI and stop turning off men when they absolutely need blacks and feminists to maintain their coalition? They keep saying they need a left wing Joe Rogan and stuff like that, but how could they possibly have one? This hypothetical person would be too cucked and people would see right through it because he would have to support things men generally hate.
I say all this to say that the people who run the Democrat Party are smart enough know this, and they'd rather keep their power, money, and influence than actually change. They'll pretend they are looking into changing the party, but deep down they know that it's impossible, so they will just keep going back and playing the hits: racism, sexism, etc. And since there are only two parties in America, they will win enough to keep the grift going.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,
My libertarian friends back in the day would have you know this line was crossed and the ship sailed the better part of a century ago. I'm not going to say I'm broken-hearted over the people that lost in the '60s, but when masked protesters [1] blocked students from getting to schools and engaged in the sorts of violence that sound a lot like the Hamasniks at Ivy League schools this past year, JFK mobilized 30,000 troops. Various Federal civil rights laws clamp down pretty harshly on certain kinds of speech in schools and workplaces (or effectively force those places to clamp down) [2], even if the penalties aren't always technically "criminal".
It feels like the broader Left is only really complaining about "authoritarianism" here because the levers controlling speech regulations that they championed are no longer under their firm control, and are no longer solely against their outgroup.
- In fact, the laws on the books in various jurisdictions prohibiting masked protests mostly date back to the time when "masked protest" meant "Klan rally".
- For most cases, I'd even agree that the speech that is banned is pretty darn reprehensible, and I'd judge anyone unironically saying, posting, or expressing those sentiments pretty harshly. But if you're complaining about restrictions on absolute freedom of speech, I'm not feeling terribly sympathetic.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
It is not. This isn't the place for starting discussions if you have "privacy" concerns that require you to almost immediately delete everything you post. If you keep doing it you will be banned.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
I don’t know how many layers of irony you’re on. It doesn’t really matter. We have banned you numerous times already for picking fights and spitting the laziest possible hot takes. Your last warning was a month ago, but you clearly didn’t take it to heart, because this is nearly indistinguishable.
Banned for a month this time.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Alright, then let me offer a clarification: I think that refusing to engage with the substance of people’s arguments, and instead accusing them of being unwitting stooges of a hostile foreign power, is the mark of someone who is not willing/able to be a serious interlocutor.
I think that probably a lot of your opinions are rooted, ultimately, in your exposure to top-down messaging which I would characterize as, if not overt propaganda, then certainly propaganda-adjacent. I’m sure you think the same of me! However, this does not give me license to simply dismiss those opinions as “regurgitating propaganda” and making a big show of being scandalized by the fact that someone here would dare to express them. If I did so, I think it would be extremely fair to accuse me of not taking the spirit of open debate seriously. And if I did it repeatedly, I think it would be fair to accuse me of not being a serious person generally. Perhaps that would be an insult, but I personally believe it’d be permissible within the rules of this forum because it is directly related to the question of whether you ought to continue to participate. (Not, to be clear, whether or not you ought to be allowed to participate; I’m certainly not calling for you to be banned or censured.)
phailyoor
3mo ago
The problem with the Jones act is that many goods shipped by boat are fungible, and international shipping is too cheap. Combined with free trade, it's cheaper to export the goods and simply import an equivalent product back. In the end the Jones act failed because domestic shipping isn't essential. If it were totally banned, people outside of a few tiny islands would scarcely know the difference.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
theoretically nation-agnostic
I vaguely recall an ISDS case I can't put a name to where Canada banned some chemical ostensibly on environmental or health grounds, but in practice because this chemical was produced by and imported from the US, and the government wanted to favour domestic manufacturers who produced something similar but not identical which was not covered by the ban.
This obviously raises the question of why US tech companies don't just ISDS everything. And I suspect the answer is that since American-style free speech is a threat to the ruling parties of many countries, rather than just the bottom line of a few specific corrupt figures, that Canada would not permit itself to lose an ISDS case against e.g. facebook.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
You've been deleting all your top-level posts.
The posts themselves were fine. Deleting them is not. The delete button has legitimate uses, we understand some people are privacy conscious, or wish to withdraw their claims. But if you're deleting a top-level post that has active discussion underneath it, and doing so consistently, you're undermining the community and acting in bad faith.
I hope you have a good explanation for why you've been doing so, because if you keep this up, you're eventually going to be banned.
2rafa
3mo ago
I'm also curious if this is a tactic to inflate deportation numbers. There is no way they hit their goal of deporting millions of illegals who have been in the country for decades
Of course it’s this. You see it in the UK and mainland Europe all the time too. They deports some tens of thousands of Latin Americans, a few Americans and Canadians and Australians who overstayed visas, some Chinese, some Thais, some Vietnamese, some Russians, some Moldovans, some Albanians, some Central Asians, the odd Turk, a few people from the nicer Caribbean islands. “Deportations are increasing!” they cheer jubilantly.
Meanwhile, the great mass of Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, Somalis and so on remain firmly in place, very much undeported. Of course it is better for America to deport 250,000 long-standing, settled Haitian or Venezuelan illegal migrants than 250,000 Ukrainians, but this administration cares primarily about optics, when it cares about much at all.
Also, don’t delete this comment in a couple of hours or you’re going to be rightfully banned.
Do you even need to go that far? As I understand it, they could simply say "Their citizenship was not guaranteed by the constitution, but it was not banned and we already chose to grant it"
But you didn't. The statute granting citizenship to Americans born in the US uses identical wording to the 14th amendment. And the statute can't be changed by executive order either. If "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" does exclude children of illegal immigrants, then Trump signed an executive order ordering the Department of State to continue issuing passports to non-citizens born before the date of the order. There are also non-citizens with passports, SSNs, etc, and a lot of citizens who no longer have documentary proof of citizenship.
If Trump and Eastman are correct about the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" then the government has been misapplying the law for decades and the resulting mess requires urgent Congressional action to fix. Cynically, the executive order is a trial balloon to get the constitutionality of the whole thing in front of SCOTUS quickly and they are planning to do the work of abolishing birthright citizenship properly once they know it won't be thrown out.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
just say the former process of granting citizenship was unconstitutional
Do you even need to go that far? As I understand it, they could simply say "Their citizenship was not guaranteed by the constitution, but it was not banned and we already chose to grant it"
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
And as such your response of "Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?" was disingenuous at best
No, you're being disingenuous. I will explain, though I'm clearly indulging you too much already since you are going in circles.
Let's suppose you're right and there's a "banned view." I assume you comprehend the use/mention distinction. So expressing the banned view would get you banned, but I am telling you directly that "I think expressing < view> has been forbidden" is not a statement that will get you banned, no matter what "< view> " is. For example, I did recently ban someone for suggesting a politician should be assassinated. Fedposting is what you might call a "banned view," but if you asked me about it ("Can I propose assassinating public figures?") I will tell you no but I will not ban you for asking the question.
Your "pattern matching" appears to miss the point of why people get banned. Just to use a few examples: people are allowed to talk about how blacks have lower IQs and criminal tendencies and to suggest that a fucntional black civilization is impossible. People are not allowed to just call blacks animals. If your "valid reasoning" (about black IQs and history) leads to "Therefore we should not coexist with blacks because they're savages", yes, that's a boo outgroup and a broad generalization
Same deal with "Jews history conflict insular clannish blah blah blah" -> Jews bad (all of them).
Note that you could still explicitly ask about any of those topics. ("Can I explain why the Holocaust is a hoax?" "Yes ." "Can I call Jews an inimical parasitical species who are the enemies of all non Jews?" "No." "Can I talk about how much I hate libs?" "If you can stick to specific groups and actions, not just Libs Bad.")
Bluntly, I think you know this and your fear of banning for speaking the double-secret banned topic is performative and fake. You just know what you want to say (probably some variation of "Fuck my enemies") won't be allowed. You claim to sincerely believe there is some view so banned that if you told me what it is, I would immediately ban you for saying it (and that I'm lying when I say I wouldn't.)
I don't believe you actually believe this. There is no Voldemort topic and you know it.
Up/downvotes mean very little in this context. People love "Fuck my enemies" posts, and they do not like when someone who posted a real ripper gets banned. When I warn or ban someone for making inflammatory generalizations about a commonly despised outgroup, I know my mod post will be downvoted. Most people are not principled and I've come to terms with that.
I've indulged you this long because you aroused my curiosity; I am always fascinated when people assert clearly counterfactual things about how they think the mods think. But since you're apparently just going to keep pretending there's some super-duper-secret extra-forbidden topic you can't even type for fear of getting banned, okay, carry on.
DecaDeciHuman
3mo ago
I was calling out the problem with the following assertion:
Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?
Namely that if someone believes that a given view is inexpressible without a ban, they are not going to express that view if they don't want to be banned.
As such "no-one has told us that a view has been banned" is irrelevant, as it would be true regardless of if there were any such views (people who don't care about being banned notwithstanding).
And as such your response of "Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?" was disingenuous at best.
For the record there are views that I self-censor here, generally because of the following pattern-match:
[post that gives apparently-valid reasoning leading to a conclusion]
[ban post whose justification appears to be that the conclusion is consensus building of a view, completely ignoring that the reasoning exists]
...from which my takeaway can only be to avoid the particular topic altogether if I do not wish to be banned.
Bonus points if the original post was upvoted and the ban post was downvoted, as - for so long as the site keeps them aggregated and anonymous at least - this is one of the few ways that people can express that a ban wasn't the right call that doesn't result in bringing unnecessary mod attention upon themselves in turn. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down and all that.
[For the record: I am being vague, as I will not state said views, because I do not wish to be banned for stating them.]
GBRK
3mo ago
Do you agree with my modified formula and if not, why does your formula measure these correctly?
I disagree with your formula but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement... I included the ΔAvg. Wages to capture the anti-immigration argument that immigration lowers wage. If you want to factor out that term because you don't believe they do, then I'm fine with that.
Even the government expenditure that isnt directly welfare still does scale with population - more people need more roads etc
Yes, but not linearly. If for every immigrant we also added an equivalent amount of land that would be true, but densifying population centers means that people increase faster than miles of roads and sewage, and you get to benefit from economies of scale and network effects for providing distribution of food and services.
the benefit doesnt require the immigrant to go to your contry specifically.
But it does? America is better than europe because we have a culture and government that makes better use of our human resources. If we leave immigrants in their home countries or send them to other sub-american countries they will be less productive than they would have been as americans. There are also services that are difficult to provide non-locally (e.g., healthcare).
And-- centralization effects are a big deal too. I've worked with a lot of indian software engineers in my time. Some of them have been immigrants to america and some have been outsourced labor. The standard anti-immigrant logic is that this should bring wages down-- but instead, America's software engineering wages are some of the highest on the planet. Having all the engineers here brings all the engineering-buyers here. High supply and competition on both ends makes our overall market for software engineering much more efficient, which raises revenues and wages. Meanwhile, if we stopped allowing engineers-- well, the outsourcing companies are still right there. If we banned immigration and therefore lost our quality and efficiency edge companies would just go elsewhere.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Cynical response: imagine if DOGE eight years ago had instead cut US grant funding the EcoHealth Alliance for gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China that was already banned by Congress. I'm sure they'd be whining like there was when they cut their funding in 2020, reinstated it after "prominent scientists" complained, and then finally banned it again after the OIG of HHS reported significant compliance problems.
I'm not completely certain of the lab leak hypothesis, but it seems a pretty plausible and concrete harm to consider. And I'm not going to Stan for the cuts more generally, because it doesn't really seem like they're neutrally considering value proposition either.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3mo ago
I think the firewall around the AFD will break, one way or another.
The question is which way. "AfD banned" looks like a live option.
No. Very few people in the medical field and certainly in the medical field with any power supported the idea that lockdowns are wrong/ineffective and vaccine mandates are wrong. Anyone who disagreed with this manufactured consensus were banned off social media during a time when that was the only place any dialogue was happening at all.
They spent years, when it actually mattered, repeating embarrassingly bad and flawed stories and studies to support all manner of nonsense and attack people who were correct the entire time. They spent years demanding censorship and attacking the licenses of doctors and lawyers who were saying the correct thing the entire time and defending people from the mandates.
Why do you give the people who were wrong and who caused enormous damage a pass, but write off the dissidents who were right the entire time and agree with you on most of your comments with respect to the Covid Hysteria? Perhaps this is mostly a language issue.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
I'm 4 episodes into Pantheon, and I think it's really good. It's not a real spoiler to say that it's about a girl whose dad (a programmer) died of a terminal illness a few years back, but it turns out that his 'failed' mind upload did in fact work.
What I found particularly hilarious was the clear Ambani-analogue in the form of a particularly unscrupulous telecom billionaire from India who owns a massive personal skyscraper with a helipad next to slums in Mumbai. Yeah, there are so many people who fit that description. I'm surprised he didn't get it banned outright in India, given how many distribution channels the real Reliance owns.
That being said, it's obvious that this was a product of a pre-GPT age. We've made minimal progress in mind uploading any organism, even nematodes. We've got connectomes, but that's like having an LLM with parameters but no weights. It seems clear to me that it'll be entirely artificial AGI unlocking human mind uploads, and not the other way around. Still a good watch, and I've only heard good things about the second season.
Believing this requires significant sane-washing of the last 8 years of media. I mean, to pick a random example off the top of my head that Youtube reminded me, Joe Biden's mental decline. The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving. They've gaslit all of the country on an industrial scale about innumerable topics, or instituted a bizarre form of cognitive mutilation where you are only permitted to think of fact in ways they have told you that you are permitted to think of them. Impossible tangles of double-think abound for sex, gender, crime, equality, equity, you name it.
I would hope Elon has better sources of information than I have. But, to pick at Zelensky's 4% approval rating Hanania leads with, is it even possible to know what the real number might be? Also, I'm supposed to be assessing these "debunks" in a media environment where all the election polling around our own election was purposeful lying. Trump's internal polls showed him winning. Biden and then Kamala's internal polls showed him winning. At no time during the entire election cycle did anyone's internal polls show anyone but Trump winning. Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.
So why should anyone believe anything these people say about Zelensky's poll numbers? How can they possibly claim to be more credible than just making shit up? If Trump and Elon want to parade around some fake numbers the IC gave them that serve their agenda, they are in good company. Well, maybe not good company, but you know what I mean. Don't pretend this is a deviation.
I mean, this is just naked revisionist history and sane washing right here.
What past is he talking about? "Misgendering" was a ban on sight offense on every social media platform. Books about it were banned, at least temporarily. Liberals didn't calmly argue with conservatives about where to get news from, they banned it. It's pure imagination that anyone, anywhere, was calmly debating what sources of information were preferable to seek the truth. It was a boot stomping on a human face thinking the roles would never be reversed.
Furthermore, I keep going through Hanania's supporting evidence, like "Editor-in-chief of The Federalist joins others in repeating repeating the completely made up lie about Zelensky meeting with Democrats beforehand." except, oh wait, here is a Democrat tweeting about meeting Zelensky before the Trump meeting. Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine. . Did the original rumor name the wrong Democrats? Yes. Is it a made up lie that Zelensky met with Democrats beforehand? Absolutely not.
Frankly it's barely worth the effort to continue to pick apart these sour grapes that Hanania isn't making the living on Twitter that he used to or expected to. Though I am especially tickled he cites Elon being on the wrong side of an argument with Sam Harris about how bad COVID was going to be. The same Sam Harris who has horribly beclowned himself with extremely motivated reasoning about the measures that he still believes were justified to deal with it. Elon might have been wrong about the numbers, but he was directionally correct about how serious to take it. Especially in retrospect, and especially compared to Sam Harris.
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