Yeah Vaush is a piece of shit, and he may have said some fucked up shit in the past but I don't think it's cool to brand someone like that when he's clearly shown that he's changed for the better on these issues. People gotta be more accepting of someone that has changed their minds for the better, otherwise everything will stay like it is.
But he's still a piece of shit, but for other reasons.
Wouldn't you rather they spend more time doing fractions instead of invading more countries?
People see leftists as people that became so by going to an expensive university that their parents paid for.
There's almost always a "hello fellow children" vibe with leftists, and many times they look down their noses at people in the working class for not appreciating how smart and generous they're being for helping out he little people with their brilliant dialectics.
But working class people aren't stupid, they all know the university leftists aren't really dedicated to any real change it's just about fitting in with their university friends. The 20 something university leftists of today turn into the asshole managers when they hit their 30s. Either that or they become professors that teach the next generation of wealthy shits that they need to say some bullshit socialist platitudes when they're young. It's important for the well-being of the wealthy so they won't feel guilty about being so wealthy later on in life because they "tried to tell the stupid peasants, they just wouldn't listen!"
This has big “I am very smart” energy.
That nicely sums up everything anyone needs to know about Vaush.
It actually happens most of the time, but people peacefully coexisting with one another is boring and war is exciting. So we tend to only talk about the war. Lately it's gotten so people have been actively denying peace and cooperation even exist which is really bizarre.
Go outside touch grass yadda yadda, and consider traveling to any of the many many countries of the world that aren't in a war. You'll find that peace and cooperation is actually the norm, and the fucked up scenarios you see on the news are actually the exceptions.
Don't get me wrong, identity is important. Even on the internet it can make sense in certain contexts like if you have a community for people of that group. There's a time and a place for that.
But in most contexts it's really unimportant in internet conversations.
But with the rise in social media it's become the most important thing on the internet to the point where people can't express ideas or accept an idea without it being connected to a person's identity. Back in the day when everyone was pseudo-anonymous there was a death of the author kind of thing on everything so it was 100% about ideas and 0% about identity.
Huh, I thought an Embassy was meant for diplomacy. A big part of diplomacy is soft power which means making nice with other countries. If a country is having a festival of some kind, it's nice to say "yeah America supports your festival because we're friendly people like that." This makes people in that country like the US a little more and furthers US interests in a small way.
I feel like your approach is to take a somewhat undiplomatic approach to how US Embassies are run.
Seems you're addicted to hating the US so much that you don't want it to ever improve.
Israel is going to get their hostages back one way or another.
Best case scenario is Hamas releases them as part of a ceasefire agreement. Israel having weapons means they have leverage over the Hamas psychopaths to compel them to release hostages making such a ceasefire agreement more likely. Hamas is a group of psychopaths, so they won't do anything because it's the right thing to so, they will only release the hostages if their lives are under direct threat.
If that doesn't work, then Israel will go into Rafah. There will be a lot of casualties if this happens. There will be even more casualties if they need to resort to using less accurate munitions as part of this assault. In this scenario the US not supplying laser guided munitions will result in increased casualties.
If you think that false accusations of genocide is going to somehow make Israel accept that their people should remain hostages of Hamas forever then you are deluded. If you think a lack of laser guided munitions is going to prevent them from doing everything they can to free the hostages, that's also delusion. A lack of accurate weaponry isn't going to prevent civilian casualties, in fact it will increase the number of civilian casualties. Is that what you want?
The rational starting point to understand this conflict is to understand that Israel is going to make every effort to free the hostages and this isn't something that is negotiable. Starting from that point think about the best course of action to minimize civilian casualties. It's not screaming "genocide." it's not blockading Israel, it's not all the other ineffective actions that deluded activists scream about constantly. The best course of action to effectively minimize civilian casualties is exactly the course of action Joe Biden is taking.
If you actually cared about really minimizing civilian casualties you'd be supporting Joe Biden. If you felt the need to scream you'd scream at Hamas to release the hostages so this conflict has a chance of coming to an end. But it seems activists are more interesting in screaming the self-righteous anger and don't really care about the lives of Palestinian people. But the self righteous anger gets a lot of internet points which is what you really care about, isn't it?
Joe Biden actually cares about the Palestinian people more than you do. You're just about being performative while being ineffective, while Biden is being effective without all the performative bullshit.
Tools will wear out too and need replacement. Boots, gloves and many articles of clothing will wear out.
If you replace a machine that does the job of 100 people and replace it with 100 people, those people will need to commute to work, they will need to eat, and this will put carbon in the air and/or use electricity. Thermodynamics is a bitch, the energy needed by a group of people to lift something will not be any different from the amount of energy needed for a robot to lift something. Growing food to get that energy and then the person shitting out the waste requiring water treatment plants to process it may not be the most energy efficient way to move heavy objects.
And I've worked on machines that can do calculations to optimize where materials are cut to minimize wastage. A human with a tape measure and a calculator won't be able to achieve this level of material usage optimization. Automation can actually reduce material waste.
A lot of the problems you mention would still be problems even if we went full Butlerian Jihad and eliminated all robots. Bad management? Yeah it's not going to go away when a manger has more employees to manage. Wasteful use of plastic in shipping things? A person can wrap stuff with plastic just as a machine does.
If you don't like automation that's fine. But there's no environmental reasons for being against automation. In fact we need to produce a lot of wind turbines and solar panels as fast as possible. Like a huge number of them. The workforce isn't big enough to produce them all.
Yeah I think it's been found that there is a sweet spot for income and happiness. Having billions of dollars won't make you any happier, but I think it's something around $120K per year that provides everything needed to have a happy life without having to stress much about paying the bills.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people fall way below the level of income needed that's necessary to be able to have a stress free long walk and a good conversation that's not about how to make ends meet, etc.
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn't.
- Don't feed the trolls
- Don't talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there's a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you're one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you're a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn't really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said "The internet is leaking, this won't end well."
Didn't realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it's cool. It's so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being "cancelled". Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around "you just can't understand my experiences" rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from "we're all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can" to "we're all wannabe celebrities that don't have time to explain anything to the losers who aren't good enough to understand our experiences" it all went to shit.
Imagine Trump posts something about "killing immigrant vermin" and there's a Nike swish with the slogan "Just Do It" beside it.
How much money do you think advertisers will pay when this is a possibility?
You're thinking solely in terms of getting attention. And yeah no doubt Trump being on Twitter would get attention. The question is how do you turn that attention into revenue?
If he’s already dropped $44B on Twitter, what’s another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?
You've jumped to the conclusion that this will save Twitter. The problem is that this will get attention (which actually costs money in bandwidth) without a clear way to make money off of it. So he'd be spending billions on something that would not get him back into the good graces of advertisers and probably cement the inevitable destruction of twitter, not save it.
Like I say, it's Elon Musk so the fact that it's a bad move means he might actually do it.
So your solution is just to do whatever the psychopath Houthis tell us to do?
Neville Chamberlain tried a policy of appeasement, it didn't work. And when you're thinking that psychopaths that attack civilians working on a commercial cargo ship are the good guys, your world view is really messed up.
You're defining your feelings as fact. Just like fundamentalist religious people that cry out "kill the infidels" do.
It's also a fact that atheists have killed even more people because of adherence to weird ideologies.
Like I say, people who are 100% certain of things can come to strange conclusions. Real life isn't so simple as seeing one person saying "kill the infidels" and concluding that all people in that religion think the same way.
Joseph Stalin was an atheist, does being an atheist make you think the same way as Joseph Stalin?
It's this face: https://www.compdermcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/vanheusen_5BSQnoz.jpg
She was asked about openai using copyrighted material for training data and literally made that face. Only thing more perfect would've been if she tugged at her collar while doing the face.
We do it so often we have a term for it: compound words.
I would explain more but I gotta turn off my desktop computer and do some chores like loading the dishwasher and cleaning up the bathroom before I sit down and watch the baseball game this afternoon before my girlfriend comes over.
I think context is important here. Asking a co-worker their salary is fine. Asking about the salary of someone you're on a date with is not fine.
Protest swiftly condemned by all levels of government; organizing group denies hospital targeted
Toronto police say they are increasing their presence along hospital row after a pro-Palestinian protest downtown on Monday night, including outside Mount Sinai Hospital.
Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told CBC News the increased police presence is to ensure that essential hospital services and emergency routes remain accessible.
"Interfering with the operations of a hospital is not acceptable," Sayer wrote in an email.
Police have not said if the hospital's operations were impacted by the protest. The hospital has not responded to CBC News's request for comment.
"The Toronto Police Service is investigating several incidents that occurred in front of Mount Sinai Hospital and along the demonstration route. As we have said before, officers use their discretion during large crowd demonstrations and even if arrests are not deemed safe to make at the time, investigations will continue and charges can be laid at a later date," Sayer said.
GENEVA, Jan 26 (Reuters) - The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday it had opened an investigation into several employees suspected of involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas and that it had severed ties with those staff members. "The Israeli authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on October 7," said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General.
"To protect the agency's ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay."
Lazzarini did not disclose the number of employees allegedly involved in the attacks, nor the nature of their alleged involvement. He said, however, that "any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror" would be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.
