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It depends on exactly what he posted. Recording himself with the letter Q in various poses, or making references to Q memes, isn't incitement. Getting someone on incitement requires specific calls to imminent violence.
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Sep 23, 2022 20:10
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Class3KillStorm posted:So Trump can only get in trouble for the speech that crosses the line, but can no one point to the months of similar speeches leading up to that moment as way of establishing a pattern of guilt? Of a downward slide of acceptability until his speech does what it is inevitably designed to do? Speech that doesn't cross the line is legal and not legally considered incitement. You can't establish a pattern of incitement by pointing to things that aren't incitement, and you can't establish a pattern of guilt by pointing to things that aren't crimes.
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Sep 23, 2022 22:46
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How does JP Morgan make money on that? Someone is going to have to pay fees at some point in the transaction, otherwise the service wouldn't make any money. They might subsidize it in the short-term to give themselves a foothold, but in the long run they'll be charging someone for this service, and merchants are the natural target to slap fees on.
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Sep 26, 2022 19:33
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Tibalt posted:I agree that you're probably right, but there have been a few counter examples in some niches. Twitch streaming does seem to indicate that whales for content creators exist, you've got furry artists living off the patronage of furries, the TTRPG market supports some people despite not relying on the ad market money. For the most part, creators are only able to build enough of a following to live off because they're subsidized by ads. They can post their work freely available for everyone to view for free, and use that free work to build a fanbase and hook whales that they can then monetize. If they had to pay to post their stuff, or if people had to pay to view it, they'd never find enough fans to make it worth putting stuff behind a paywall. And the platform facilitates that because it places ads next to their free work.
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Sep 27, 2022 22:09
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:We live in the worst possible timeline, so I bet she will still win her primary, but someone just asked Schumer about the DSCC's policy to support all incumbents and whether it applies to Krysten Sinema and he said, "Well, the policy is not to directly support primary challengers to incumbents." Sinema's still going to be in that seat for a minimum of two years, so Schumer's not going to go out of his way to publicly antagonize her now.
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Sep 28, 2022 21:47
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BonoMan posted:The FFEL thing was always a huge up in the air question. I never thought they explicitly stated they'd be covered (but could be wrong on that). As a holder of FFEL loans I was always looking for guidance and basically everything I found said most wouldn't be. The barometer was "did your FFEL loan qualify for the COVID pause? No? Better loving consolidate now." Seems like Republican politicians are filing lawsuits using the FFEL thing as a basis, the banks are threatening to sue as well, and the administration would prefer not to have the entire student loan relief program put on hold by a judicial injunction right before an election. From the NPR article: quote:Multiple legal experts tell NPR the reversal in policy was likely made out of concern that the private banks that manage old FFEL loans could potentially file lawsuits to stop the debt relief, arguing that Biden's plan would cause them financial harm.
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Sep 29, 2022 20:09
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Laterite posted:Sure, but the state lawsuits that seek that outcome already were, and are now, happening regardless. So this is pulling the football away from the kicker when half the defense isn't even on the field. If the thing that the lawsuits are based on is no longer happening, then the lawsuits will be rejected by the courts as mooted and no longer an issue.
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Sep 29, 2022 23:36
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the_steve posted:I would imagine the argument against it involves the slippery slope. Algorithm-driven sites already tend to penalize stuff like that. They tend to categorize LGBT content and resources as too "political" and "controversial" and penalize them in searches...unlike unhinged right-wing rants about
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Oct 3, 2022 18:36
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Kalit posted:
That's why this lawsuit isn't targeting individuals posting videos. It's targeting the algorithm that detects "this person might be open to white supremacist ideology and conspiracy theories" and starts filling their recommends and autoplays with white supremacist conspiracy theory videos.
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Oct 3, 2022 23:22
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I've never claimed that Youtube shouldn't take more responsibility or that they're my friend? 
Especially when it could have a chilling effect on good content that exists
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Fifteen of Many posted:https://twitter.com/sollenbergerrc/status/1577071370457923584?s=46&t=znFWX9IdAnYoWSkTYw-_LA The funniest part is that Walker's campaign kept actively reaching out to her to try to get her to endorse him. quote:The woman, a registered Democrat who still communicates with Walker, said he did not tell her about his plan to run for the Senate before his announcement in August 2021. Since then, however, one of Walker’s top surrogates has asked her repeatedly if she would be willing to vouch for his character, reaching out as recently as this August.
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Oct 4, 2022 00:55
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Kalit posted:I was trying to speak to the broader point of what projecthalaxy posted for combating these ideals. But focusing on the lawsuit itself, is this an actual issue? Like my previous comment, white supremacist/etc is more visible, but are YouTube/etc algorithms spreading those ideals at an increasing rate? I was talking about the way that the algorithm identifies what someone might have interests in, and suggests more content that it thinks might appeal to them, which is the specific thing at issue in the Gonzales case. The lawsuit isn't making any claims about Youtube magically radicalizing people out of nowhere. Instead, they're saying that Youtube detects people who are already sympathetic to radical ideologies, and feeds them more radicalizing content on purpose because it has correctly determined that they like to see that stuff. That study does not evaluate that claim, nor does it establish a methodology that would allow it to evaluate that claim. The study focuses exclusively on what a logged-out user with no watch history would see, and makes no attempt at all to compensate for non-account-based fingerprinting. I also have concerns about that study's categorization system. For example, they put CNN, MSNBC, and NBC in the "Partisan Left" category. Which, to be clear, is separate from their regular mainstream media category, which they named "Center/Left MSM" and which appears to be dominated by Joe Rogan and overseas news sources like the BBC, Sky News, and WION. Despite all that, the handy viewer they set up shows that the radicalization pipeline is very much active on smaller channels and categories - even in this ideal case with no coherent watch history to inform recommendations. If you watch a Fox News vid, it'll recommend other large news organizations without considering ideology, and will be just as likely to send you to "Partisan Left" sites like CNN as anywhere else. But when their bot clicked a video from a small MRA channel, the most likely recommendations for the next video were more MRA channels, then "anti-SJW" channels, then political channels they couldn't categorize (such as the Daily Mail), then "Partisan Right" (Fox News, The Sun, New York Post, etc). The alt-right talking heads onboarding sphere seems to be particularly tightly linked in their data. Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Steven Crowder, PragerU, and a few other names I don't recognize were very closely associated by the recommendation algorithm, such that watching a single video from one was highly likely to recommend you videos from the others in that group.
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Oct 4, 2022 04:10
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Kalit posted:So.... maybe I'm missing your point, but are you saying this is uniquely more dangerous than how recommendations have worked in the past? What you're describing sounds to me like how recommendations within media has always worked. If my local bookstore had a list of recommended white supremacist literature posted anywhere on the premises, I would probably consider that a contribution to violent radicalism! As for whether it's uniquely more dangerous, I don't think anyone said it was! I certainly didn't, and I'm not sure where you got that claim from. You're arguing against points nobody made, while ignoring the points people are actually making. Lastly, there are extremely obvious differences between a physical list of recommendations posted on the wall vs personalized auto-generated recommendation lists instantly created and updated from your exact media-viewing history.
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Oct 4, 2022 04:41
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Kalit posted:I'm still not understanding your point. I'm sorry if you think I'm arguing against points nobody made. This is why I tried to ask that clarifying question as my opening sentence in my previous response. One of them is written by the author or content creator, while the other is created by the bookstore or platform. One is crafted by a human being, while the other is generated automatically by an algorithm. One of them gives the same recommendations to everyone who reads the book, while the other gives different recommendations to each person. One of them is based solely on the author's own tastes, while the other is targeted and personalized using large amounts of data (not only from the userbase in general, but also from the specific viewer) to determine the optimal suggestions for maximum engagement. One of them requires you to go physically find and buy each item on the list of suggestions, while the other shoves one-click links right in your face and (by default) will automatically start playing the top suggestion after ten seconds even if you don't lift a finger or spend a single cent. And to bring this conversation back to the original point, only one of them currently enjoys legal protections protecting the entity creating the list of recommendations from any legal liability related to the list.
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Oct 4, 2022 07:43
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ColdPie posted:No it isn't. There are ten hundred billion guitar institutional videos out there. 98% of them are trash. They use algorithms to sort out the good ones from the bad. Bad actors abuse that same algorithm to put crazy videos in front of people. Sorting out how to get the good (high quality content) from the bad (crazy poo poo) is a really hard problem. There's a further problem that both avenues are profitable for the platforms so they're not really incentived to fix it. Throwing it all in the trash and just returning all videos that have “guitar instruction” in the user submitted keywords isn't a solution, it's the death of that platform. There's a problem here, but “banning algorithms” isn't the solution. You're making a big assumption here: you're assuming that the death of these platforms is a bad thing. You're right in that these platforms, with their massive feed of completely unfiltered data, would be largely unusable without feeding everything through algorithms that analyze the entire userbase's data to present the content that gets the most engagement while hiding the content a user is unlikely to enjoy. After all, that's the core of the social media business model: let everyone on the planet provide as much content as they want for free with no filtering or oversight, use that to grow a massive userbase, then use a system that analyzes user response to everything they see in order to determine what they should see. It's a "quantity over quality" model that relies solely on reading the behavior of a massive userbase to make an overwhelming flood of data usable for literally anyone. But in my opinion, that exact business model is exactly why social media sucks so much. The entire model the whole thing is built on is inherently impossible for humans to effectively moderate, but current tech is nowhere near being capable of effective automatic moderation of content. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the social media business model originally assumed that content moderation would be almost unnecessary, because (in theory) the algorithm would naturally stop showing a user any content that user personally found objectionable. Social media platforms have since learned that running stuff like that is wildly insufficient in a variety of ways, and they've worked to awkwardly retrofit a wider array of moderation tools and options onto their original systems, but the reason they've struggled so much with it is because the model is fundamentally unmoderatable and they know it.
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Oct 4, 2022 17:38
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Robviously posted:My guess is he just figured out something that's going to end up coming out in discovery of the lawsuit that he wants to get around. or he's dumb enough to think this would be a Discovery has been going very badly for Musk, with a lot of sketchy stuff coming to light. There were a lot of missing messages, evidence that Musk used platforms with auto-deleting messages despite claiming that he didn't, evidence that Musk may have communicated with Twitter insiders via "alternate secure means", evidence that Musk's own data scientists weren't backing his claims, and so on.
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Oct 4, 2022 19:26
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if they deny it and claim that Twitter never really had an intention to sell.
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Randalor posted:Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he currently being sued to force him to purchase Twitter, because he tried to back out of purchasing Twitter, after he had already signed the binding agreement to purchase it? Correct. He already contractually committed to buying Twitter, and has no legal grounds to get out of buying Twitter. The only way he's not buying Twitter now is if a Delaware Chancery Court judge decides they don't give a gently caress about contracts, which is incredibly unlikely given that Delaware is the central hub of US corporate law. The entire reason he's being sued right now is because he's trying to back out of buying Twitter, even though he had no real legal grounds to do so. It seems like he hoped to find something incredibly humiliating or incriminating in discovery, and use the threat of disclosing that publicly to force Twitter to back down. But it turns out that, despite the fact that Musk himself largely refused to cooperate with discovery and tried to cover up the existence of a bunch of stuff, Twitter found way more humiliating and/or incriminating stuff from Elon's side. His billionaire friends have been thoroughly embarrassed, he's been caught in several lies that are guaranteed to completely doom his case at trial, and now Twitter's lawyers are starting to find evidence of even more misconduct. His plan has thoroughly backfired at this point, as not only did it completely fail, but it also gave Twitter a very good case for insisting that they can't trust anything he says. His current offer of "please drop the lawsuit and then I'll buy Twitter if Twitter follows the agreement" is unlikely to be taken seriously by anyone actually involved in the case, especially since he makes a point of not dropping his claims that Twitter broke the agreement. Since Twitter's current management does not trust Musk at all, they are unlikely to take Musk at his word. Without some kind of ironclad irrevocable guarantee, they'll try their best to keep the lawsuit going until that $44 billion check clears. Kavros posted:I honestly don't know what he's going to do. To greatly oversimplify it, he's got to wring more out of twitter than it already (arguably unsustainably) makes ... way more ... just to service the debt he puts himself in to pay off the purchase. Based on both his public claims and private stuff that came out during discovery, Musk's plans for Twitter include convincing a bunch of people to sign up for optional paid subscription services (like Twitter Blue), mass layoffs of Twitter employees to cut costs, maybe a Twitter-based payments system, and assuming Twitter's actual human userbase will triple within three years after he bans all the bots and unbans all the brave free speech warriors of the far right. There's also other ideas he's tossed around but clearly hasn't thought through, like charging important people a fee to tweet, creating a blockchain-based Twitter database to resist censorship, or turning Twitter into a WeChat competitor.
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Oct 5, 2022 17:48
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FlamingLiberal posted:Apparently this happened earlier It's worth noting that this particular ruling doesn't really mean anything, because it's only ruling on the three-page memorandum of intent that was used to originally establish DACA. But that memorandum expires for good on October 30th. The Biden administration, in an attempt to ward off some of the avenues for legal challenges, has replaced it with a 400+ page formal policy established through the official executive rulemaking process, which goes into effect on October 30th and will replace the old DACA memorandum. Will this actually affect anything in the long run? Hard to say. But in the short-term, the court has explicitly declined to rule on the upcoming rule at this time, despite literally everyone in the case requesting that they do so. So the court is only overturning the existing DACA memorandum, and expressing no opinion on the replacement DACA policy that comes into effect at the end of the month. It'll take another round or two of litigation before that one comes up, and the Fifth Circuit (which I feel will likely overturn the new rule as well) seems well aware that the case will eventually end up in front of the Supreme Court and that the SC is not necessarily fully on board with their reasoning.
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Oct 6, 2022 03:53
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I AM GRANDO posted:Are there really undecided voters at this point in history? Or is that meant in the sense of “undecided about whether or not they’re going to bother voting this time”? There were real undecideds as recently as 2020. You can usually find a few articles in each election cycle where reporters go and talk to undecideds instead of doing a Trump safari. From what I've seen, self-proclaimed undecideds usually seem to fall into one of four major camps:
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Oct 8, 2022 19:58
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Young Freud posted:I guess at some point Amazon is going to have to do a cost analysis and see if costs more hiring content managers or paying out lawsuits. There's always a third option: stop using that algorithm altogether. It's not like it's some super smart demonstration of incredibly machine intelligence. It's just querying the database for things that are commonly bought in the same transaction as the item the user is looking at. It's not an essential part of the shopping experience, it's just Amazon trying to nudge people into buying more poo poo. The problems here aren't unique to automated algorithms. The well-known anecdote of Target sending maternity advertisements to an expecting mother before her own family knew about her pregnancy came as a result of a few marketing folks asking the company's statistics department whether there was a way to tell if a woman was pregnant. By the time anyone realized the potential PR risk, the stats department had already worked out product cues that could be used to track pregnancy and created a database query for it. The resulting backlash was so bad that the marketing department actually went back and made the pregnancy advertisements less targeted on purpose so that people wouldn't feel like Target knew so much about them. That was mostly human effort, but it still points to the big problem with automating this stuff: when it was under human control, it was done for a few products and/or demographics that were considered especially important, and any Bad Idea decisions were signed off by a human who had specifically asked for that Bad Idea. With an automated algorithm, it's done for everything by default, ensuring it will find every possible bad idea through sheer brute-force. No marketer is ever going to go and ask the stats department how to target suicidal customers, but the algorithm doesn't have any idea what "suicide" is - it just knows that these products are often bought together.
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Oct 9, 2022 20:03
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pencilhands posted:What exactly is their motivation for harming their own community like that? They honestly believe that the six hours a day of Torah study are far more important for the kids' well-being than the one hour of secular studies. For them, the fact that it also leaves the children totally unequipped for secular life is a plus, not a minus - it ensures their children won't be seduced away from the godly path to do things like challenge the rabbi's authority, leave the community, or (worst of all) have a relationship with a non-Jew. For many of these parents, religious life is literally life itself - and anyone who doesn't participate in religious life might as well be dead. And that's not as much of a metaphor as you've might hope! I've seen ex-Satmar folks talk about how they've heard that their parents are holding funeral prayers and memorial prayers for them like they're literally actually dead (and of course, those parents will actively refuse any sort of contact with them and their sinful secular life). Stories from people who've left these communities can get pretty tragic.
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Oct 12, 2022 20:37
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Youth Decay posted:The level of isolation/treatment of women differs greatly between Hasidic sects. Chabadniks/Lubavitchers send their kids to ordinary colleges, use the internet/social media and interact frequently with the secular world. I have a Lubavicher aunt, granted she's baal teshuvah (grew up in a secular family and became more religious over time) so had received a full education herself but she's a public school teacher and managed to raise their nine children in between the two worlds, with some going to college (one to a PhD) and others pursuing trades or other work within the community. Satmars are the most extreme, they have the most stringent codes on modesty and try to keep totally separate and out of view of the outside world. I think her article very clearly comes from a perspective of wanting to protect her own in-group, with whatever rose-tinted blinders are necessary to defend it. At best, she's so deep in cognitive dissonance that she doesn't notice the massive and obvious internal contradictions in her own arguments. On the education side of things, she insists that actually Hasidic Jews all hate the total lack of secular education and secretly wish that it would change, and that actually it's totally about to change all on its own as long as no one comes in and tries to force them with draconian government oppression. She insists that the government coming in to force change would cause a backlash, and that such a confrontational approach would galvanize resistance. But then she pivots to an example that has nothing to do with force or the government: an activist campaign from ex-Hasids that "naively thought it would just ask the community to change" and "naively expected community cooperation" (as she puts it), spawning massive resistance to even a simple billboard campaign. And if you look closely, she doesn't actually address the lack of secular learning at all. She briefly mentions it, but it seems clear that the only educational improvements she hopes for are in the reduction of corporal punishment: she's fine with the lack of secular education and doesn't expect it to change or hope for it to change. On the economic side of things, it's just whataboutism. She goes on for paragraphs about how it's the responsibility of a society to prepare children for life within that society, while admitting that Hasidic schools see their own society as separate and don't give children even the most basic preparations to survive in secular society. But then she follows that up by implying it's the secular system's fault for being hard to navigate if you can barely speak English and don't know how to take tests or use a computer. While it's a fair point out of context, the context is way too important to put aside here. She's not talking about refugees or kids from badly-underfunded school districts here, she's talking about well-funded schools that are intentionally refusing to provide that basic education. It kind of feels like she's co-opting the language of the disadvantaged to defend a system that intentionally makes its own members disadvantaged in order to keep them dependent on that system. I agree that it's too hard to make a decent living if you don't have even a basic education, but hearing that in defense of a purposeful refusal by schools to provide a basic education is utterly absurd. And if you read down to the final note at the end, it makes her bias extremely clear. Faced with a 100% failure rate on a standardized test, she outright refuses to believe it. Despite repeatedly admitting in the article that Hasidic kids are not given a decent secular education, she's shocked by the assertion that they could possibly fail on secular tests, dismissing it with a simple "Hasidic kids are not illiterate or stupid". Instead, she insists that the numbers must be rigged somehow, insisting that a proper test would have at least one student passing out of sheer luck.
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Oct 12, 2022 22:15
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cat botherer posted:It's been post-apocalyptic for a couple centuries now. Can you explain this a little further? It's kind of a bizarre thing to just throw out there with no further elaboration.
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Oct 18, 2022 00:41
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selec posted:I grew up poor, and am now not poor, and the main, overriding difference between poor people and rich people is money. Rich people are just as bad with money as poor people, it’s just that they have a lot more and we’ve constructed a society designed to pamper and forgive them, and to punish and discipline the poor. Poor people go to jail for things rich people don’t even get arrested for, they struggle with addictions rich people pay to be bailed out of, they get called lovely parents because they gotta work so much when rich people just can’t stand to be around their kids, and are lauded despite rubbing our noses in their breeding fetish (Elon!) I don't think any of this is wrong, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to the immediate humanitarian crisis in Haiti? I feel like "armed gangs have blocked off crucial infrastructure and cut off people's access to daily necessities" falls into that 10% of daily woes that won't be solved by giving everyone more spending money.
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Oct 18, 2022 20:44
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tristeham posted:here's a sample of what the narrative around haiti was a week ago The media has been covering the serious gang issue and the humanitarian crisis they're creating for months. Here's a few other pieces from Al-Jazeera:
It may be getting more mainstream media attention now (or perhaps people are simply paying more attention to the media articles now), but the situation has been bad for a while now, and it's been steadily worsening - especially with the fuel blockade over the last month. There's also been on-and-off protests for the better part of the last year, and the government has been begging for foreign intervention for a while too.
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Oct 18, 2022 21:48
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cat botherer posted:I’ll risk being probed again to say that given the history of interventions (very much including the Japanese occupation) it is not clear that intervention leads to less rape. Often, the opposite has wound up being true. The US occupation of Japan is a completely different situation, given that it was a conscripted military force engaging in a forcible military occupation of a country that had little to no internal violent dissent (thanks to severe internal suppression by a draconian military regime) right up until it lost a years-long bloody war. That's not really comparable to a small volunteer multinational peacekeeping force being invited in to aid the local government in maintaining order. And I think that's a pretty good example of how this conversation would go a lot smoother if people were willing to commit to making specific claims, instead of vague sweeping statements that just obliterate any sort of nuance and are basically impossible to have a real conversation about. You're comparing the unconditional surrender of Japan at the end of World War II to a request for military aid in suppressing organized crime, and then accusing other people of making other people aren't making "apples-to-oranges" comparisons when they try to narrow that absurdly broad conversation down to the actual specific details of the current situation. cat botherer posted:RE: "overall rates of sexual violence" This is another example of statements that are so lacking in specifics that they're actually rather difficult to grapple with. You're citing every single US and UN intervention in history as reason to believe that intervention will increase the long-term rape rate in the country. But the US has engaged in literally hundreds of foreign interventions over a period of centuries. And the UN has engaged in over seventy official peacekeeping missions since its founding after WWII. It's actually rather difficult to paint that huge number of interventions, under wildly varying circumstances, with a single brush. So that's actually an incredibly broad statement being thrown out there, without even the slightest bit of further elaboration to let us know what about those hundreds of interventions makes you think that. It's also rather flippant, to the point of being rather callous. If you're going to be talking about rape rates like this, I wish you'd treat it with either a little more seriousness or a little more sympathy. It's not like you're being super bad about it, but "the expected amount of Haitians that get raped" is a hell of a subject to lay out and compare calculations on, especially when the calculations aren't really based on anything and it's not part of a serious effort to consider the specifics of the situation.
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Oct 19, 2022 04:29
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Nucleic Acids posted:I don't believe he's actually a socialist in any sense and there's an absolute history of the US bumping off someone they found inconvenient and replacing them with someone even worse/more incompetent. I hate to say it, but this is looking a lot like conspiracy theory reasoning. You don't have any actual evidence, and you're arguing that any facts that don't fit your preconceived notions were faked by the conspiracy to cover up their true involvement. If you were pointing to something in his personal history or what his political record, that'd be one thing. But you haven't shown any indication that you even know who the current leader of Haiti is. You're claiming that he's a fake socialist solely because you believe the conspiracy would never allow a true socialist to come to power and survive. It's fine to use history and ideological beliefs to inform your interpretation of current events, but when you don't even need to hear about current events to proclaim your verdict, that's just dogma.
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Oct 19, 2022 17:19
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Maybe because it's not certain the Haitian government is acting in the best interests of it's people? Why do you think the Haitian government isn't acting in the best interests of its people? Note that the existence of protests is not, by itself, evidence of this. And if they aren't, then do you think there's some other entity in Haiti right now that's doing a better job of acting in the interests of its people? Is there someone who has a better plan for stopping the rampant violence and is in a position to pull it off? Do you think that not intervening will prevent the US from making the problems worse? These one-liners aren't really making it easy to get a sense for what you're arguing. To have a discussion, we need a little more than a single sentence. It's entirely possible that a US intervention could, in some situations and circumstances, actually make things worse. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's the case in many situations and circumstances. But that doesn't mean we can just ignore the situation and circumstances completely. I don't think a military intervention alone will help things long-term. But when gang warfare and intentional blockades are jamming up basic logistics to the point that half the population can't even consistently get food, bringing in an armed force capable of securing basic transport routes is probably necessary to prevent a bunch of deaths while larger questions of political and/or economic change are worked out. It'd be nice if they could deter some of the rape and murder, too; I'm not super optimistic about the impact they'll have there, but it'll probably be at least a small net positive.
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Oct 19, 2022 17:43
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Fister Roboto posted:I think that the US should help Haiti with money and food and other humanitarian care, and not anything to do with guns and troops. The US already is, as are the UN and various other international aid groups. The problem right now is that gangs have blocked roads and major port facilities, making it impossible to reliably transport that food to the people who need it. And at this point, it's extremely unlikely that the gangs will go away simply because of political or economic reforms. In this particular situation, I can't think of any remotely plausible alternative to using troops to protect critical infrastructure and break the blockades on vital resources. Haiti obviously needs economic and political changes as well, but "heavily armed warlords have claimed all the food for their groups" is an issue which can't wait around for the elite classes to negotiate a settlement they can all agree on. Somebody needs to make it possible to reliably transport food around the country without it going right into gangs' stockpiles, even if that means defending the food by force. And the Haitian police aren't up to the task, though it's not clear to me how much corruption plays a part in that (the gang leader running the main fuel blockade is a former cop with close ties to the Haitian police and to the previous government).
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Oct 19, 2022 20:05
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Fister Roboto posted:I already responded to this exact same point that Leon made. Yes, I'm aware. I was responding to that when I said "I can't think of any remotely plausible alternative to using troops to protect critical infrastructure and break the blockades on vital resources". I don't see how the current situation gets solved without violence, and vague handwavey references to historical US crimes and wildly incorrect analogies don't give me any confidence that you see a way to solve it without violence either.
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Oct 19, 2022 20:42
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Eric Cantonese posted:I know it's not fun to think about, but what's the least bad realistic option when it comes to Haiti? In the short-term, getting the blockades cleared out and critical infrastructure and logistics secured is an absolute necessity. And unlike a true rebellion, gang warfare isn't easy to stop with just political and economic concessions. There will likely need to be an armed deterrent of some kind to at least restrain their movements. They're ultimately gangs using a local monopoly on violence to prey on undefended shipping and families, not insurgents fighting to the death to drive off invaders, so something like that should hopefully be at least somewhat effective. In the long-term, there isn't really any tried-and-true solution to this kind of political chaos. Haiti has basically no military (it was disbanded in the 90s in hopes of stemming the trend of military coups), serious corruption problems among the fairly small police force, and gangsters who were allegedly given immunity and weaponry by the police as part of corrupt deals with previous administrations. With all that in mind, there's little to no hope of the government regaining the monopoly on violence anytime soon; no amount of foreign help will be able to have a long-term impact there as long as the government is weak, corrupt, and lacking major public support. On the economic side of things, an already bad situation is getting the usual IMF treatment that's making everything worse, and even massive subsidies and aid wouldn't necessarily solve the problems so easily. And while it's pretty clear by this point that Henry is pretty crappy at the job and plenty unpopular to boot, finding a replacement who's up to the enormous challenge of bringing things under control won't be easy. But while bringing Haiti back to stability is a problem that won't be easy to solve, it should at least be possible to clear up the immediate humanitarian crisis. As bad as things are in Haiti, by far the biggest problem is that it's become impossible to consistently supply food and fuel to many areas of the country, which in turn is having a serious impact on other critical services like healthcare and sanitation. Even if actually getting rid of the gangs won't be easy, it should at least be possible for a decently-equipped armed force to drive them away from port facilities and major roads, staving off the immediate risk of famine and helping get the current cholera epidemic under control. Maybe if everyone's really lucky, it might even be able to somewhat reduce violence levels in major residential areas, though that might be a bit of blind optimism from me.
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Oct 20, 2022 06:24
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Musk says he wants to: I can't think of a bigger red flag of institutional rot in Twitter than newly instituting stack ranking in 2022. It's an infamously bad practice in the tech industry, notorious for its longtime use in Microsoft, where its numerous flaws have been very well documented. Throwing Twitter's entire workforce into a crab bucket and only keeping the first 25% to climb out could very well be devastating. A potential issue I don't see coming up much in the media reporting about the Twitter deal, though, is how blatantly politicized it's already become. Hardcore Trump supporters are ecstatic at the idea of Musk buying Twitter, and start screaming about liberal plots to sabotage Musk every time anything slows the deal. I wonder about the long-term impact that'll have on Twitter's business under Musk. https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1583414733478064128 Eric Cantonese posted:I keep hearing about how Facebook is supposedly in danger but they seem to be doing just fine in terms of userbase. Their main problem seems to be lighting money on fire trying to establish the Metaverse. Facebook's user numbers are dropping, and (more importantly) they're having a harder time effectively monetizing those users. The drops in revenue and userbase are fairly small so far, but Facebook doesn't have any real path to reversing either, and if advertisers start to lose faith in them it could rapidly turn into a death spiral (though companies that big don't die fast, no matter how disastrous their business model becomes). That's exactly why they're shoveling money into the metaverse furnace. Their core business is starting to disappoint the markets, and they don't seem to have a way to get those numbers back to levels the investor types will be happy with, so they're going back to the tried-and-true startup tactic of promising some big moonshot breakthrough in hopes that it'll distract the media from their dwindling revenue.
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Oct 21, 2022 16:19
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Automata 10 Pack posted:I can't find an economics thread, but if the inflation is due to corporate price gouging, why have the markets been reporting losses per quarter and the stock market been so low? Who says the inflation is due to corporate price gouging, and why are they saying that? Is there a particular claim that you've seen that you don't think is right? What kind of arguments have they made in favor of that claim? There have been several mainstream theories to explain the inflation, and while the "corporate price gouging" one is ideologically compelling for many people, it's hardly the only proposed explanation.
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Oct 21, 2022 20:18
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Mendrian posted:The courts doing whatever the gently caress they feel like appears to be a preview of the next decade. There were a bunch of different, separate lawsuits filed against the student debt thing, all filed by different plaintiffs in separate jurisdictions and going in front of different courts. This case was filed by state AGs in Missouri. The one that the Supreme Court refused to hear was filed by a conservative anti-tax group in Wisconsin. There's several more cases that have yet to reach a ruling, too. Judgy Fucker posted:I would also like to see the numbers showing that the debt ceiling is a thing that many voters care about, let alone know it exists. The question isn't whether they currently have any opinion on the debt ceiling. The question is what their immediate gut response will be when they encounter the phrase "debt ceiling" for the first time in a poll or campaign ad a week before the election.
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Oct 22, 2022 16:12
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Judgy Fucker posted:That is absolutely not what evilweasel said, which is: No, it implies that when you tell or ask voters about removing the debt ceiling, they don't like it. Whether they knew about the debt ceiling before you asked that question doesn't actually matter.
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Oct 22, 2022 17:14
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cat botherer posted:Not to put works in Judgy Fucker's mouth, but I think the main point is that they want evidence (like polls) of this claim, and aren't primarily interested in semantic debates. This is D&D after all. It's not polled very often, since it's rarely a significant political issue. But when it does come as a political issue, voters are pretty consistently skeptical of debt ceiling increases, and typically want them to be paired with spending cuts. Moreover, they largely don't realize the importance of debt ceiling increases, and have no idea how bad it would be to fail to raise it.   Of course, this isn't coming from an educated position about the debt ceiling. For the most part, voters don't know what the debt ceiling actually is - but that just means that they're relying heavily on their gut response to the word "debt". Naturally, they have no idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling would mean default.  Moreover, there's indications that voters don't even realize that the GOP's debt ceiling brinksmanship risks sending the US into default. At the very least, they don't seem to realize that the GOP are the ones pushing for default.  That lack of voter knowledge does mean that strong messaging could probably have some impact. Sufficiently strong push polling can come up with >50% approval if they load the question heavily enough; pointing out that the GOP raised the debt ceiling several times during Trump's administration proved to be a particularly effective message, probably because it swayed Republican respondents who had overwhelmingly opposed it when they thought it was a Democratic policy. But two weeks before election day is not the time to start trying to change voter's minds on a policy.
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Oct 22, 2022 18:11
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I AM GRANDO posted:Will this be a twitter renaissance, or is it going straight into the toilet? In the long run, it's definitely heading for the toilet, but Musk is notoriously subject to changing his whole stance at a whim - as was demonstrated when he basically begged Twitter to sell to him, signed a binding contract with no path to back out, and suddenly decided he didn't want Twitter anymore. So we don't know how quickly he'll come up with bad ideas, or how stubbornly he'll stick to them in the face of pushback. But that chaotic management style will inevitably drag Twitter down, even if he ends up backing down from the worst ideas. His currently stated plans for Twitter are all dumb and bad, but there's no telling how fast he'll move to implement them.
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Oct 28, 2022 13:50
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Eric Cantonese posted:This is a weird Tweet. Process servers aren’t supposed to engage in the kind of evasion and breaking and entering a guy with a hammer and the intent to harm would. If everybody’s just punching a clock and not taking the assignment seriously, I can totally see how a random white dude could sneak in. https://twitter.com/pnjaban/status/1586046196346368002 She's trying to distract from the political aspects of it, reframe it as "crime" (instead of "terrorism" or "assassination"), and then tie it into the GOP election messaging about crime waves in cities. The GOP's been heavily pushing tough-on-crime messaging in recent weeks. Quietly discarding the political aspects of this and reframing it as "even wealthy white women with their own private security aren't safe from robbery and murder" is a message laser-focused at exactly the kinds of swing groups they're desperate to capture.
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Oct 28, 2022 20:55
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The person who assailed Paul Pelosi, breaking his skull and injuring his right hand, is being charged with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, battery, burglary and several other felonies. There's no need to seriously entertain any claims that a Q dude using a hammer to crack the skull of the 82-year-old husband of a speaker is actually some kind of false flag. It's worth noting that the Pelosi attack isn't the only reason Smollett is trending, though. Katie Hobbs' campaign office was robbed the day before yesterday, and her opponent dismissed it as "Jussie Smollett Part 2" before launching into what CNN describes as "a lengthy rant against the media". It made it into all the news coverage tweets. It's not just Democrats being targeted, either! A few days ago, an openly white supremacist member of various hate groups with a history of picking fights against anti-racist activists got into a fight with a gang member while canvassing the neighborhood for Rubio. When he first reported it to the police, he didn't mention any political aspect to the crime, but after talking to his white supremacist buddies and to Rubio's team, they suddenly started claiming that the assailant shouted that Republicans weren't allowed in that neighborhood (which, incidentally, was known as a very GOP-leaning neighborhood), and he suddenly started repeating that story as well. It's been staying in the news all week, as the media dug into the claims and surfaced a bunch of suspicious stuff (with the help of Miami anti-fascists, who already knew that guy well). https://twitter.com/MIAagainstFash/status/1426398389651001347 FL GOP really bringing their best. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Oct 29, 2022 |
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Oct 29, 2022 18:34
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I AM GRANDO posted:How has twitter stayed afloat all this time? It’s always been unusable and full of nazis. There’s a thin crust of absolute psychos who post hundreds of times a day there and I can’t imagine they’d ever stop, but what would it take for twitter to finally die? It's the only site where you have a reasonable chance of getting a sick burn on a billionaire or celebrity, and it's the only social media site I can think of that has working text embeds everywhere so you can go rile up your friends to go yell at every dumb take you stumble across.
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Oct 30, 2022 20:35
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:55 |
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Musk is the richest person on the planet. He doesn't need to be the president, he can buy the friendship of plenty of politicians and get plenty of status and money that way. He's already got the Texas GOP in his pocket.
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Oct 31, 2022 20:08
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