Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:
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Fool me once…
I think that is really the core of it.
I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.
I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.
It’s a battery factory that was built there despite environmental concerns.
I think the main things that attracted the ire of environmentalists are:
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But the situation is a bit muddy. Early protests around 2021…2022 often had a share of far right wingnuts trying to recruit people. That’s lessened, though. This specific protest was definitely swelled in numbers by the factory expansion and land clearing plans, but is also part of a planned day of protests by the “Disrupt Tesla” group. They have a web presence here: https://disrupt-now.org/en/.
So true. By this point, Russia is already using everything it can, short of an actual, hot war with the west. And their military is stretched to the limit already without that.
I think this sabre rattling is still useful to them as a one-two-tactic:
Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!
I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).
This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:
Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.
Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).
For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)
And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):
TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).
That would give me some hope, but I’ve also seen indications towards the opposite.
I watched some recent talks between Chinese officials and what I think it was a German delegation seeking to convince China to exert more pressure on Russia. The Chinese politicians sounded exactly like Russia-indoctrinated tankies, talking point for talking point. When asked about a specific German politician In an interview with a journalist, one Chinese official spewed forth a shower of insults (all the favorites, from “unhinged” to “deranged”, “delusional” and “hysterical”, just one after another, at least that’s what the translation said).
I really hope what I’ve seen there is just an outlier.
Just some thoughts:
Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.
Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.
If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.
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I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).
elitist, college liberalism ideas
liberals are becoming way more rude, aggressive. Elitist,
young privileged, college liberals who look down on everyone
That smells an awful lot like ring wing indoctrination 101:
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You wrote two and a half paragraphs that are essentially just liberal bashing. My experience is that liberals are the people who don’t judge you for personal choices, who reach out a hand even if you’re worlds apart.
My observation:
They position themselves similar to classic revolutionaries - they claim to be the counterpoint to the “establishment” or to the “out-of-touch elites.”
That’s pretty tempting for people who don’t like the direction the world is heading in. Most don’t see or don’t want to see that the AfD is chock full of the exact people who rule them from the top down, police their opinions and take away their personal liberties.
What’s tragic is that, historically, a left wing group would normally find itself in the position the AfD is holding now. Yet here we are, after 50 years of slowly shifting rightwards until the social contract began breaking, with a party that offers a harsh jump further right as the revolutionary cure.
They had a serious investigation going, but that was during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister (BoJo = the Trump-impersonator with the silly hair), so it was pretty handicapped and when the investigation stopped, well:
Johnson’s government refused to release the report to the public before the general election in December 2019.
By June 2020, the report had still not been released, and the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been convened, the longest gap since the committee’s creation in 1994.
(from Wikipedia)
Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)
The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into “window-looking jobs,” employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.
Yep. Push and pull.
Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.
That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…
That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).
I’m already using Git for source code related versioning, but some use cases involving large binary files with partial updates aren’t well covered by Git (I’ve gone into some detail in my reply to @[email protected]).
There’s also the lack of svn:externals in Git. Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository as far as I’m aware.
I’m already using Git, thus my experience with Gitea. I am well versed with svndumpfilter and git-svn to extract and migrate individual Subversion repositories to Git.
I’m not only hosting code, but I have several projects involving large binary files with binary changes. Git’s delta compression algorithm for binary files is so-so. Git LFS is just outsourcing the problem. Even cloning with --depth 1 --single-branch gives me abysmal performance compared to Subversion.
So I’m still looking for a nice WebUI to make my life with the Subversion repositories I have easier.
After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.
It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).
Also literally from the article I posted:
“We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services,” the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”
Neither of our quotes really adds anything to the discussion.
A nebulous policy to reject “anything WL can’t verify” or “has been published elsewhere” or “is likely to be considered insignificant” or is “diversionary (to WL’s election interference)” is a carte blanche for Assange to turn down anything that he doesn’t like.
What I have seen concrete evidence for is that Assange wanted Trump to win (In Leaked Chats, WikiLeaks Discusses Preference for GOP Over Clinton, Russia, Trolling, and Feminists They Don’t Like <- contains verified excepts from leaked internal WikiLeaks chats). And for strongly pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory (hinting in multiple interviews that Seth Rich was behind the DNC leaks and even posting a $20000 reward for the murder case).
I won’t even ask for concrete evidence that the FBI has framed Assange, because in the big picture, it doesn’t change who he is or what he does. To me, it’s been sufficiently proven that he takes sides (that’s an ‘F’ for integrity, report the story, don’t be part of the story), that he collaborated in anti-democratic GOP activities and that his promotes views that align with the gunk spread by “Russia Today” or “Sputnik.” Whether that’s because he a Russian asset or because he’s had a false awakening into the conspirational world view Russian information warfare uses to twist people, who knows. I’ll withhold judgment on that one, but I also won’t expect him to do anything good for the world.
Months of careful work by the Obama administration for that deal, and bit by bit, Iran had started to become more moderate, too. It allowed international observers and IAEA inspectors to check things out from up close in addition to spy satellites and intelligence agencies.
And then Mr. Orange guy comes along and tears it up for the sole reason that he wanted to look “tough.”
Except that unilaterally ripping apart your contract and demanding that the other side gives you more concessions, well, apparently it works out exactly like one might expect it to. Truly “the Art of the Deal”, real “master negotiator” stuff.
I believe the idea is:
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But increasingly, I see step 2 fail and people simply hate the guy more for his destructive megalomania, as they should.