listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for "official acts", and places the authority to determine what is and isn't an "official act" in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn't "get away with everything", and we shouldn't assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump's eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

India was Britain’s favourite colony and it’s clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it’s clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.

when did these countries become "clear"? do you know? it wasn't a billion years ago, lemme tell you that, and it isn't all sunshine and roses in the modern day. as it happens, there are quite a few queer people from all the places you've mentioned who would probably disagree with this perspective, myself included. queer rights and queer liberation is an ongoing process in all the places you've mentioned. we've not reached some post-homophobic utopia by any means.

If you think that ex colonies aren’t capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.

right. so you don't want people to think about the ways that colonialism impacts the cultures of the colonized people (that's racist, apparently), and just straight up deny the fact that a great deal of these laws are, as written, directly sourced from British colonial law codes, to support your particular interpretation of Islamic depravity. many of the states on the list are majority christian, especially the ones in Africa, but its whatever. don't let nuance get in the way of your Islamophobia.

Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.

yeah, right, a single image of a map "proves" your extremely common right wing opinion beyond refutation. and the whole "religion is the problem" bullshit. as if the ills of the human condition can be reduced to a single solitary source. i get it, you like Sam Harris (or maybe Richard Dawkins, considering your spelling). you're an Atheist. but the world is more complicated than that, and injecting your own biases about people that aren't like you does nothing for nobody. religion didn't happen in a vacuum. it's not some outside force that warps us into a state of conflict and subjugation. religion is just culture, power, and hegemony. it was made by humanity's stupid monkey brains, and is shaped around the biases inherent to our cognition. we'd find a way to hate each other without it.

the world won't automatically be better by its absence, and rhetoric pushing Islam as somehow quantitatively worse than others is just fuckin' bigotry. that's why people give you shit about this. you aren't some free thinker by thinking Muslims are icky, you're just reproducing dominant cultural narratives about the backwardness of people you don't know, narratives built by Christian nations to justify conflict and conquest, just as modern Muslim nations have identified themselves in contrast to secularized formerly Christian nations.

in short, learn more about the world, and stop relying on the baked in biases we all inherit from our culture to decide which quarter of the world population has the bad evil religion. its not a good look.

British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago

lol. lmao, even. British homophobia has not ended. Britain is a modern hotbed for anti-queer bullshit. the consequences and effects of British colonial rule have not magically been wiped clean. we aren't "blaming dead people", we're talking about the impact that colonial and imperial oppression had on the cultures of oppressed peoples. the structure and politics of the British Empire are inextricably linked to the world we live in today, and attributing modern queerphobia to the oppressive and cruel politics of the one of the largest imperial powers the world has ever seen, who directly imposed anti-queer laws onto the people they oppressed, is not about "fixing" things. its about recognizing how the past has shaped our present.

its funny, i think, how willing Islamophobes are to bring up the present anti-queer stances of religious nation-states as reflecting upon the religion of Islam itself, with all its 2 billion adherents spread over every continent and nation in the world, while failing to recognize the role of the Christian church in both the historical and modern anti-queerness of the British empire and the modern european state. somehow, you see clearly the monstrous power of religious authority in one hand, and dismiss it in the other. you propose anti-queerness as an essential quality of Islam, and seperate it from the essential qualities of european nation-states.

somehow, Muslim homophobia is special in its qualities, rather than a modern trait that arose in the same period of the 19th century under which the Christian hegemony was exported throughout the world by the British empire and its contemporaries. somehow, it is always the case that the religion that is foreign to you is the true danger, what should be the focus of our attention.

it is important to "oppose" whatever's present now. but Islamophobes diagnosis for whats "present now" so often fails to acknowledge the immense influence and power that european religious institutions have had and continue to have over the anti-queer policy of their former colonial projects (like Uganda, for example), and their prescription for what "opposition" looks like happens to look a lot like religious and racial discrimination. funny how that works. singling out Islam as the true danger to queer people does nothing to help queer people. in fact, the mechanism by which Islamophobes identify a whole fourth of the world's population as uniquely dangerous, violent, and backwards is exactly the same mechanism by which queer people are identified as perverse, deviant, and predatory. prejudice.

the acronym LGBTQ+ arose out of solidarity. people with different experiences, extremely different in some cases, coming together because they recognized that their struggle was alike. that they were together subjected to the violence of prejudice and discrimination, and that they were stronger together than alone. that is what needs opposing in the modern day. the violence of states. the violence of hegemony, dictating to us what we ought to be and what we cannot be, wherever it is found. not a diverse religious tradition that contains the same number of queer people as any other population of humans.

he looks like a wax figure holy shit

or maybe you don't have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren't endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

prefigurative politics!

its not completely wrong. getting cosmetic veneers is a pretty common practice in hollywood. they don't cause your teeth to decay or whatever, but lots of celebs have them.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually "open" or even currently "openable". We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don't have the tools to actually "read" a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren't that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they're doing or how to change their behavior.

same. audio accounts for so much of the friction i've experienced on linux its crazy. it works fine for general computing (after tons of troubleshooting), but it kind of convinced me that i'd probably need to dual boot if i wanted to try music production. i'd love to be proven wrong about that.

link! i didn't know Internet Archive had a merch store.

I’m not understanding a word you are saying

that makes two of us, i guess? i don't know what it is you're trying to say i was saying. to be more clear, i've been seeing a lot of talk in this thread arguing against the "video games cause violence" claim, as if that was what the lawsuit was about. i don't think the contents of the article present the families' lawsuit as primarily concerning that particular claim. i then attempted to describe what i believe their actual claim to be.

i've emphasized the words i think are relevant here:

These new lawsuits, one filed in California and the other in Texas, turn attention to the marketing and sale of the rifle used by the shooter. The California suit claims that 2021's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare featured the weapon, a Daniel Defense M4 V7, on a splash screen, and that playing the game led the teenager to research and then later purchase the gun hours after his 18th birthday.

that Call of Duty's simulation of recognizable guns makes Activision "the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States."

the fact that Activision and Meta are framing this as an extension of the "video games cause violence" thing is certainly what they've decided to do, but it seems to be talking past what the complaint and lawsuit are about, which is the marketing of a Daniel Defense M4 V7 in 2021's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

the reason i emphasized the gun model is that that seems, to me, to be the core feature of the case the families are trying to make. not that video games cause violence, but that Activision bears responsibility for the actions of the shooter because the shooter played their game, then proceeded to kill people with the specific model of gun that was being advertised in that game. the fact that the article takes the time to reference another case where the specific naming of a gun model lead to a sizable settlement, and says this

The notion that a game maker might be held liable for irresponsibly marketing a weapon, however, seems to be a new angle.

seems to support my reading. that isn't the same thing as saying video games make you violent, which is the claim a bunch of people in this thread seem to be shadowboxing.

i dunno, maybe there's some ambiguity there? are you arguing that the lawsuit is about rehashing the video games make you violent claim, or what? i genuinely don't know what you're trying to communicate to me. i hope this clarified my stance.

some of y'all definitely aren't reading the article. this isn't a "video games cause violence" thing. they are suing Activision and the gun manufacturer Daniel Defense for marketing a specific model of gun in Call of Duty, and maybe? that the Uvalde shooter used that same model of gun in the shooting. i dunno if there's merit to the argument, but like, categorically, this isn't the "video games cause violence" argument y'all seem to think it is. its about a gun manufacturer advertising their product in a video game.

plenty of people?

this isn't necessarily true. patterns in data aren't by nature proof of an underlying system of logic. if you run the line-fitting machine on any kind of data, its going to output a line. considering just how much data is encoded into these transformers, i don't think we can conclusively say that it has a underlying conception of how language works, much less an understanding of the concepts that language represents. it could really just be using the vast quantities of data it has to output approximately correct statements. there's absolutely structure there, but it doesn't have to have the kind of structured understanding humans have about language to produce language, in the same way a less sophisticated machine learning model doesn't have to know what kind of data its fitting a line to to make a line.

its from the DMX track "X gon' give it to ya". it came out in 2002.

it chunks text up into tokens, so it isn't processing the words as if they were composed from letters.

corporate governance structures are anti-democratic by nature. framing corporate capture of innovation, economic opportunity, scientific research, and our most critical services as a positive thing is grotesque. nobody should own lifesaving research. nobody should own our houses, our hospitals, our livelihoods and our parks, corporations shouldn't be able to decide what causes are worthy, what challenges can be addressed. we should. the people who do the work, who make the products, who do the labor that serves others, not unaccountable boards of ultra-wealthy assholes who think they get to make our decisions for us, and are using that power to actively kill the fucking planet.

if you wanna lick the boot, have fun with that corpo.

again, deflecting blame. it doesn't matter who started it, it doesn't matter what "every single nation on Earth" would have done (although I think there's plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn't even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i've heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel's actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don't want to die of starvation. i don't want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

this is not "think of the children". its "tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government". we aren't appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i'm sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don't get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they're using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a "master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it", if you're genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.