Yes, I agree. I‘ve long said that Greene (and Boebert) are what you get when someone who actually believes this shit gets into power.
I don‘t follow this stuff closely enough to know how this article fits into her history, but the Epstein stuff is completely consistent. And, while I don‘t agree with 99% of her principles, it actually shows her to be more principled than most of Trump‘s followers, who were fully against paedophilia when Pizzagate was a thing, but who now seem to think that it‘s no big deal and that every man would fuck a pre-teen if given the opportunity to do so.
I mean, it‘d be a little weird if they were still born in the 60s, had kids in their teens/20s, and those kids were still kids in 2025. I don‘t really know what anybody complaining is expecting.
There‘s a lot of power in telling people „yes, you can say that out loud now“. But there‘s also a lot of power in not playing the same game as anybody else. There‘s power in being the guy who doesn‘t watch what he says because he‘s a politician.
Here in the UK we have a similar politician in Nigel Farage - far right, and very much able to speak to people on the level of „I‘m not like all those stuffy politicians, I‘m an ordinary bloke just like you“.
It‘s not true for him, either, and I find him equally repulsive, but I can‘t deny that they‘re both effective at making people think „he‘s one of us!“ And it‘s not that other politicians don‘t try, at least here in the UK, which is why you‘ll find endless photo opportunities of them doing things like drinking a pint in a pub. But those always seem fake and hollow.
I see Farage and Trump described as „charismatic“. I don‘t think that‘s quite the right word, because that suggests a sort of charm, I think. But I can understand on an intellectual level why some people find them appealing.
The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.
Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.
I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.
The broader point, though, is that the scenario of The Lord of the Flies has actually happened. We’ve had a small group of kids trapped on an island for an extended period of time and what happened is that they built a peaceful and harmonious society, which included spending time and resources caring for one of their number who broke their leg.
Given the way autistic respondents have answered the other questions in this survey, you’ve probably worked out where this is going.
Yep, less than 10% of autistic respondents wanted a cure for their autism, and over 80% did not.
And, because if you’ve read this article all the way through you know how much I love pre-emptively addressing counter-arguments, here’s the bar graph in response to those thinking “yes, but this doesn’t represent those poor nonverbal people with learning difficulties”.
It really was surprisingly how near-identical these two graphs are. Experience told me to predict a similar result but even I didn’t expect it to match up quite this well.
Of course, even then there’s a counter-argument – that people who want to push back even further will argue this doesn’t include autistic people with extremely profound complex learning disabilities who don’t know what a survey is.
Leaving aside the inbuilt ableism in that assumption (and the fact that even if the survey didextract the opinions of those with complex disabilities, some people would still argue against any results they don’t want to acknowledge), I’ll say the same as I did in 2018- that:
To me, it seems illogical to say that just because an autistic person can’t access this survey, their opinions on a cure will suddenly become the polar opposite of their autistic peers.
Yeah, Irfanview is what I use too. Easy to set up, quick & light, and it‘s actually my go-to for converting a picture into a different format.