It’s the 48 Star American flag, thus it’s the German American Bund in the 30s. To be fair to the literal Nazis pictured it’s before the holocaust was discovered. It’s not AI, it appears in this 2017 article: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/

They’re really against anything nice that can be achieved through cooperation, aren’t they?

Nah they would just invent new races. What’s the point of race? What does it mean exactly? Notice that the races in the US at least roughly align with economic classes.

That’s not an accident. Obviously without the concept of races, people would still have different skin color and hair, but the implications would be entirely different. Culture, neighborhoods, etc. wouldn’t be separated. And most importantly, it would be ever so slightly harder for rich people to make the majority feel like they’re in the same group as them as opposed to some “other”.

So if there was only one race, the rich would need to invent new ones.

Bill Maher used to be a right leaning “centrist” when he was running politically incorrect in the 90s. His politics never changed, he just got critical of crazy Republican shit like the Iraq war and then Trump ignoring elections.

A certain percentage of all people are bloodthirsty monsters, especially when it comes to people unlike themselves.

And anyone who thinks this problem is caused by no one trying to use a bomb, gun, or flamethrower to solve it is the biggest idiot in planet earth.

To be fair, that grey tree trunk looked a lot like a road

Or vote against the one party (starts with an R) that continues to make the duopoly happen by banning RCV, and for the party (starts with a D) that’s far more likely to implement RCV.

The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it’s still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it’s blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.

It seems that the woman has a penchant for believing mystical guidance. “A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took a whole year for her to accept that none of it was real,” the husband said.

That should’ve been the first clue. I can date someone who engages in fantasy for a bit, but if they never come back to reality then just put the relationship down humanely.

I get where you’re coming from, but in the interest of keeping my comment simple I left out that he claimed to be hiking in Dumbarton Oaks Park, which is not far (and downstream) from the picture I posted such that it wouldn’t be plausible that it would be that narrow.

But I’ll also point out the level of incredulity my comment is getting on a social media site, vs. RFK Jr.'s, which should strike anyone familiar with Rock Creek as almost certainly wrong. Yet everyone in the whole news media is either willfully ignoring this or just too lazy to look into it. And honestly it pisses me off because this lack of giving a fuck about basic facts from reporters who we falsely imagine as being employed in reporting facts shows how much we’re in a post-truth society and why we got a con artist as our president.

THIS IS NOT ROCK CREEK FFS

Everyone including major media sources is parroting what RFK Jr. said in his instagram account as if it’s gospel. Go to google maps. Look at Rock Creek. Look how big it is. This is not Rock Creek.

The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.

Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.

As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.

Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.

I’m plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It’s like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.

Notice how this gets so much less attention that it did during the campaign even though its only gotten worse. Just remember: many of the people who claim to care, don’t. And if you actually want to stop this, it needs to start with putting people in power who actually care about stopping it. If there isn’t one in the general, that means this didn’t happen during the primaries.

This was a pretty interesting read: https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948

There was a point where many peace activists saw zionism as a good thing, but then the zionists chose a fascist leader. To be fair in the 1940s it might not have been clear yet that religious nationalism is bad and tends to lead to fascism. What’s odd is that many still haven’t figured this out yet.

This of course applies to Hamas as well, which is why there’s not going to be peace in the middle east until there’s a secular group in charge of things on at least one of the sides.

Later this year: “I was right, but I actually meant to say ‘into’ instead of ‘to’ and ‘someone’s’ instead of ‘your’”

The headline is misleading in that this is not the court’s overall opinion, but a concurring opinion that would’ve gone farther:

While Mintz agreed with Amit’s ruling, he dissented on the notion that Israel has any legal obligation to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, asserting that the matter falls under the discretion of the government and security authorities, and the court should not intervene.

Basically the majority opinion is that Israel is complying with international law…which I won’t defend, but it’s quite the opposite from what the video is claiming.

I know everyone’s gonna respond that Israel doesn’t actually care about international law, but the video is saying they’re not even pretending and they are, in fact, pretending. No - stop - reality does matter and you shouldn’t encourage people who spread misinformation even if they agree with you. Because then they become Matt Taibbi.

It’s not all him, several other people invested in both. According to some article Elon owns 79% of X, and only 54% of xAI (barely enough to control it). Since the valuation of X in the deal is about $20 billion more what others have estimated ($12.3 billion), it definitely seems like it’s a corrupt bailout 46% funded with other xAI investors’ money, basically netting Elon $8 billion overnight.

That being said, the other investors in xAI are easy marks like Marc Andressen (famous for funding Adam Neumann’s project that came after WeWork) and various Saudi Royals who possibly were convinced that this is ok.

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Meanwhile Rubio is proudly bragging about revoking student visas entirely for pro-Palestinian speech. Marco Rubio is not the voice of reason in the white house, he’s an enemy of the Constitution.