We had a fight, and a fire extinguisher may have come off the wall at some point. A fire extinguisher makes a surprising amount of mess if you’re not aware. There’s not some huge story here. It was a fight that involved a fire extinguisher.
Like that time I had that fire extinguisher fight with my brother…
See. This is how it’s done.
IRON YOUR DAMN FLAGS PEOPLE!
I hate it when the hip kids these days use the word “popular.” They’re not even referring to populare politicians! They’re not referring to populares; they’re not even referring to the optimates! Kids these days with their new fangled slang.
I just remove my upper layer of skin whenever it gets too hot.
How is this Leopards Eating Faces?
Eh. We can use some of the good things from the past without using the bad as well.
I like this look. It has this aura of beautiful golden light about it. It has that aura without going the full gaudy gilded look like you would find in something the president built.
People vote based on principles and strategies different from yours. Bitching about it won’t change that fact or help you win elections. Enjoy your 5 minutes of hate.
If nothing else, at least the new Iran war will make all us Millennials feel a bit young again. Time to relisten to American Idiot, at the very least.
Or maybe I’ll just feel even older, as I can’t believe we’re still doing this shit.
Seems we could use a few thousand decent people to join ICE and start exercising some of the ideally non-violent techniques found in the CIA’s civilian sabotage field manual from WW2.
“Oh shit. Sorry boss. I thought this ICE van ran on diesel fuel, not gasoline.”
“Ah crap, I left the door to the detention van unlocked and all the prisoners ran away!”
“What do you mean I’m lazy and unproductive? I’ve been at every one of our raids. Just because I didn’t apprehend anyone myself, doesn’t mean I wasn’t working.”
“Look, I’m just being thorough. It’s important to check, double check, and triple check any orders or warrants. There’s a lot of people trying to sabotage ICE right now. That’s why I always confirm our orders both in email and in person before moving forward. I would also like to hold a meeting to plan how we might establish a committee on preventing leftists from sabotaging ICE.”
Collect a paycheck, drain ICE funds, and be the most unproductive and incompetent ICE agent in history.
As another trans person, I say the best thing to do now may be to avoid the typical liberal “protest and vote” advice. Protesting simply isn’t as effective as it used to be, and voting should not be the foundation of your political activities. Voting is useful, but especially in a firmly blue or state, it’s mostly a symbolic gesture.
There are trans people in your local area who are being hurt by this administration. Forget protesting. Focus on helping the actual material needs of the community. Every blue state currently has trans refugees coming into them. Often these are young adults showing up with few resources, often ending up homeless. There’s likely a population of homeless trans kids in your own community. These are the people you should be focusing on helping right now. Join a local trans support group to help out your brothers, sisters, and siblings. If an organization doesn’t exist, start one. Things to focus on:
Housing and access to housing
Job assistance.
Food and other essentials (one group in my area runs a trans specific food bank, as many trans folks have had bad experiences with church-run food pantries.
Medical assistance. Provide recommendations to local providers. Educate people on safe DIY use. If there are local HRT homebrewers in your area, help organize distribution and mutual aid.
*Traditional gender support groups for newly transitioning folks.
Honestly, for trans people, it’s completely valid to just laser focus on the material needs of our own community right now. We’re being targeted by an organized campaign of state persecution. There’s hundreds of thousands of us that are internally displaced refugees within the borders of the US. There’s a lot of people hurting, and a lot of people in need. Protest if you want, but personally, I’ve found focusing on direct material needs and mutual aid to be a much more productive and rewarding path. The Trump regime is trying to destroy us. Simply helping your brothers, sisters, and siblings is an act of political resistance and defiance.
Your goal is not to bring down the Trump regime. That is not your responsibility. For those most targeted, simply surviving these years is your primary act of resistance. Take care of yourself, and take care of your brothers, sisters, and siblings. That is how I as a trans person have found meaning in this time. I voted, but that was only symbolic. And I’m not currently participating in protests. I’m focusing on actually directly helping people instead. Survival is resistance.
Nobody wants Iran with nukes.
Frankly, I do want Iran with nukes. Iran hasn’t declared war on anyone for over 200 years. They’re stuck in the same neighborhood as a rogue nuclear state that engages in frequent wars of expansionist conquest. The region is incredibly unstable precisely because there is no military counterbalance to Israel. Iran getting nuclear weapons would be an immense boon to peace and stability in the Middle East. I trust the Ayatollahs with nukes a lot more than I do the Israelis with them. At least the Iranians don’t believe that their deity gave them the right to annex entire nations.
I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.
Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.
I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.
This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.
Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.
https://medium.com/@ashwinjitsingh/the-trolly-problem-utilitarianism-vs-deontology-bd624a8e321e
If one were to take a utilitarian standpoint, the means are justified by the end, which from a utilitarianist perspective, is the maximization of benefit. Hence, for a utilitarianist, whatever option guarantees the outcome of the maximum benefit is what is moral. Therefore, in the trolly case, a follower of classical utilitarianism would say that it is morally permissible to sacrifice 1 to save 5.
The deontological perspective in contrast, advocates for the means justifying the end. This, for a deontologist, the morality of the action should be based on whether the action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than being based on the consequence. In this light, a follower of deontologism would argue that it is morally impermissible to sacrifice one to save five because making the choice of having to kill someone is inherently wrong.
Again, this is the entire point of the trolley problem. No one actually give a shit about the hypothetical trolley. The whole point is to explore how different ethical systems can lead to different outcomes. There is no “right answer” to the trolley problem.
Yes, France, the country, and France, the nation also share the same name.
Whenever I see people talking like this I get white nationalist vibes.
There are different levels of bombing. This wasn’t the US assassinating a single general. This was a strike on strategic assets comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We just did a Pearl Harbor against Iran.
Has Kamala come out yet to denounce a single one of Trump’s Israel policies? Unlike a lot of other Democratic lawmakers, she has yet to publicly condemn the strike on Iran. From what evidence we can actually observe, it seems she supports the current strike. Or at least she doesn’t oppose it. There’s little reason to think she wouldn’t have ordered the exact same type of strike Trump just did. She would spin it as “being the tough cop on the international scene.”
New law. LLMs will only be accessible in very particular forms. Engaging with an LLM will be more like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. You’ll have to travel to some remote location and ask the LLM in person. It will then respond in riddles or vague prophecies that leave a lot open to interpretation. This will be the only legal way to use an LLM.