The USian compulsion to externalize every problem it has as analogous to a foreigner (sometimes even a caricature of a foreigner made up by the US) is really something that should be studied. It’s like this knee-jerk inability to take on any responsibility for the US fundamentally being shit. Possibly in part due to the religious-like treatment of the constitution. And the endless vilifying of leaders and/or peoples of other countries over decades, which has made it basically a constant thing to have one foreign specter or another in the public view.

I’m not saying it is wrong all the time but it’s outright dangerous to abandon critical thinking as a whole and accept ChatGPT as some sort of deity.

Tbh, it’s best practice to assume an LLM is wrong all of the time. Always verify what it says with other sources. It can technically say things that are factual, but because there is no way of directly checking via the model itself and because it can easily bullshit you with 100% unwavering confidence, you should never trust what it says on the face of it. I mean, it can have high confidence (meaning, high baseline probability strength) in the correct answer and then, depending on sampling of tokens and the context of things, get a bad percent on one token and go down a path with a borked answer. Sorta like if humans could only speak in the rules of improv’s “yes, and…” where you can’t edit, reconsider, or self-correct, you have to just go with what’s already there, no matter how silly it gets.

Terrorist state of the world that accuses everyone else of being terrorists.

Like imagine if this story was about Russia or something, the US would be saying forcible regime change is needed. The US behaves for real like the terrorist caricatures in their atrocity propaganda about other countries.

I only read the title at first and thought this was a metaphorical analysis of US foreign policy lol.

Not really in this context. Your “white” status can evaporate in the moment if you are defying the will of white supremacy. Saw it plenty in 2020 protests. Which incidentally, is when this article was first published:

Editor’s Note (6/11/25): We are republishing this piece from 2020 in light of the recent protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.

Bees I get, but Ants I don’t understand that one. I’ve long thought of them as a decent analogy for settlers, considering they seem to spread endlessly with no regard for what is already there and they take something akin to slaves: https://blog.entomologist.net/do-ants-hold-other-insects-as-slaves.html

I’m with you on this. I get the disability argument, but I also get that when things are new and scary, focusing on a narrative for how it can help those who are most in need is one tactic for pushing it through, even if it’s a bad idea overall. I trust that China will at least be more humane with this than, say, the US, but it’s some of the most terrifying tech humans have ever flirted with, IMO; you just know the capitalist/colonial types of the world are salivating at the idea of how it can be used for ads and/or mind control.

It’s also scary from a competency standpoint because, well… this article puts into words better than I think I could: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

But I will try to give the gist: humans have a tendency to make analogies for the brain and body relevant to whatever the latest tech development is (in modern day, computers), but this gets proven wrong time and time again, and causes even competent academics to have a poor framework for how they think about what we have. So the connection I draw here is, I fear for people coming at this from a broken framework to begin with, thinking that they can hook up brain and computer like they are similar things when they are not at all proven to be so.

I would much rather heavy research be going into understanding the brain better (which we still know so very little about) than try to shove computers into it.

I find the tone kind of slapdash. Feel like the author could have condensed it to a small post about using AI agents in certain contexts, as that seems to be the crux of their argument for usefulness in programming.

I do think they have a valid point about some in tech acting squeamish about automation when their whole thing has been automation from day one. Though I also think the idea of AI doing “junior developer” level of work is going to backfire massively on the industry. Seniors start out as juniors and AI is not going to progress fast enough to replace seniors probably within decades (I could see it replacing some seniors, but not on the level of trust and competency that would allow it to replace all of them). But AI could replace a lot of juniors and effectively lock the field into a trajectory of aging itself out of existence, due to it being too hard for enough humans to get the needed experience to take over the senior roles.

Edit: I mean, it’s already the case that dated systems sometimes use languages nobody is learning anymore. That kind of thing could get much worse.

Also Oklahoma: https://apnews.com/general-news-96b8a77a2f7b177a5c20431940860c06

(from 2020 is the most recent I could find on their child marriage laws)

Oklahoma lawmakers rejected a bill that would have stripped from parents and legal guardians of minors the legal power to consent to their marriages.

Oklahoma law allows teenagers 16 and older to get married if a parent or legal guardian consents or through a court order. Anyone younger than 16 must obtain a court order to get married.

Anyway, general point being, the US ruling class does not give a rat’s ass about protecting children. It just really likes using the law like a hammer and taking it on minority groups via selective enforcement and/or false accusations. We can expect that’s what will happen here. They launder it through issues like this precisely because it makes you sound like a bad person if you aren’t salivating to inflict maximum damage on the worst of predators. But in practice, we know they aren’t exactly going to be rushing to use it on white cops, legislators, rich people, ya know. And we know US cops suck at actually solving cases much less doing it accurately, unless it involves targeting minorities or enemies of the state (then they suddenly remember how to make things happen).

There are times when it’s hard to put into words the banal vileness of systemic brutality like this.

Edit: Like the article title is really not doing this justice. This is effectively, “Insurance Company Accused of Pressuring Medical Staff to Murder Patients”.

He should totally seize control of Walmart and nationalize it in order to keep costs low! In fact, nationalize the biggest private industries while he’s at it! Show em who’s boss! Fire every capitalist who opposes him and replace them with working class representatives! Can’t get no respect from the capitalists, he’s gonna have to bring in people who can respect others. And can’t trust just anyone either, lot of sycophants out there, so he should totally draw from indigenous states for help and support, and listen to their advice on what to do with the US going forward.

I can count 2 people out of 5 who responded to you who said something insulting. Although I don’t generally endorse it as an effective means of getting through to people, it is a trivial nothing next to a narrative that vilifies those who are doing armed resistance against colonial occupation and genocide.

In other words, it’s not about you and overly focusing on those who make it about you, who are tired of hearing the words of zionist garbage, is distracting from the point. You should want to support the cause as best you can because you believe in it, not just because people in its orbit are nice to you. Of course, being nice can be a very effective persuasive tactic for a myriad of worldviews, but it does not in itself mean one is on the “right side of history.” Many a “nice” liberal ends up supporting imperialist wars, so…

Zionist propaganda is the source of that nonsense. Zionist propaganda that is there to try to justify genocide and further Islamophobia.

White people being genocided for being white is basically a logistical impossibility. White isn’t an ethnicity and it only exists via a system that upholds it as superior as contrasted against others. And if whiteness as a concept collapses, what we’d be left with is a bunch of different european ethnicities, with varying levels of animosity toward them in various places in the world, depending on how complicit they are/were in the west’s historical atrocities, whether they are colonizers and don’t respect indigenous sovereignty, etc.

Idk, seems pretty easy to simply not use the slogan since it apparently originated from a slave trader. Not exactly the best slogan anyway. Incredibly vague, like anti-boot I guess in connotation, which isn’t the worst thing ever outside of any historical context of its origins. But could easily just be a mindless anarchism cry, which means nothing if you aren’t taking into account who is doing the ruling and who is resisting the rule.

thanks :)

We can call it FORK as in Fascism, Organized Racism, and KKKolonization

“What is socialism?”

“You just triggered my trap card. Allow me to explai-”

“Sorry folks, we’re out of time, see you next show!”

Well manufactured consent for it and will to enlist in that fight aren’t necessarily the same. Having some anti-China fears/thoughts won’t necessarily translate into personal risk, in other words. That’s where I think the individualism is sorta a double-edged sword aspect of capitalism and its imperialist wars; on the one hand, it makes it harder for people to organize against the system and on the other hand, it means people don’t want to make personal sacrifices for the system. Like the manufacturing stuff and that poll about how many people who were in favor of local manufacturing vs. actually want to do that kind of job. I could easily see legislators rallying around a war, but the actual masses is hard for me to believe.

At this point, it’s almost as if the US isn’t creating a reserve army of labor but an actual literal military army of desperate people that can be focused into a meat grinder for a world war. With no prospects at any level, people will be forced to consider violence and the jingoism, racism, and orientalism will continue to ramp up until people can only understand their suffering as a result of what those foreigners did to us and sign up to go get killed in a war.

Wouldn’t be surprised if they want that to happen. Although I’m doubtful it would work very well. There’s just so much individualism in the US, not enough agreed upon sense of “patriotism” for people to rally around, and among those who are not versed in socialism/communism, quite a lot of blaming republicans or blaming democrats, depending on which “side” a person lands more on. So even among those who don’t have a socialist view or an anti-imperialist view, they may still have a “this party sucks” view and not want to go along with a war for that reason. As it is, I don’t know how long this Trump stuff can go on, even in the short-term, without something sparking. Through the mixture of dumping on the federal gov and fucking around with global trade like it’s a game of Monopoly where he does a table flip, his admin has gotta be creating a lot of local enemies and not just in the typical USian way of “exploited minority group.”