• 45 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • One of the essential facts about geopolitics which leads to maybe more types of misunderstandings than any single other one, when people don’t realize it sufficiently, is that every big country and government is made up of an absolute legion of little individuals, all with their own motivations and habits and behaviors.

    It’s natural to say “Russian wants this” or “the FBI operates this way,” but that’s not really how it works. There’s a certain institutional momentum, and certain policies and individual behaviors that are common all throughout an organization, but “the FBI” doesn’t really have motivations and behaviors as distinct from the people within it, and even in something like the FBI or CIA, the people are an irregular mix of individuals.

    And, one of the most effective ways to turn the entire weight of the organized entity as a whole against you, is to do something to really piss off the people who make up the entity, as individuals.



  • To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.


  • Gabbard was always a counterintuitive choice

    question her credentials

    In a striking series of exchanges during her confirmation hearing on Thursday, Gabbard declined to denounce Snowden in unequivocal terms, despite repeated chivvying from Republican and Democratic senators, and to the obvious chagrin of both sides.

    You fucking idiots. She’s a Russian asset and her boss plans to destroy the US government to the best of his ability, including your role within it, Republicans and Democrats alike. Speak plainly. “Counterintuitive.” Fuck you.

    I won’t say that The Guardian’s reporting is not an accurate view of the establishment’s sanewashing of this loony and treasonous choice that is simply one among many. But it should be the job of the journalists to point out when the establishment has its head up its ass, and needs to realize that there is a threat to its existence it is ho-humming along and more or less completely failing to recognize.


  • That’s not actually completely true. As I understand it, the NTSB investigates crashes, and the FAA does permitting and enforcement of safety standards. They’re two separate agencies specifically so that the crash investigators won’t need to hold back, if there was something in the safety standards or permitting that was a factor in the crash, and needs to be changed going forward.

    Of course, that’s exactly the kind of corruption-resistant forward thinking that Trump hates, so he’s probably going to have Elon Musk’s new girlfriend take over both of them and have them both run as a single agency going forward. If they still exist at all. It might just be the girlfriend getting ChatGPT to write investigations and safety standards both.


  • I wasn’t saying that I couldn’t find any Jesse Welles video on Odysee. So !jesse_welles@rss.ponder.cat is linked to Jesse’s YouTube RSS feed, so it auto-posts anything he puts on YouTube. That doesn’t apply to that channel or any other one that I could find on Odysee, meaning that if I switched to that Odysee channel instead, Jesse wouldn’t get the revenue from the views (microscopic though I’m sure it is), and also I’d be promoting what looks like a pretty sketchy “free speech” based channel that among other things links to a Substack with stories like “Putin: Ukraine Crisis Could Have Been Avoided If 2020 US Election Wasn’t Stolen”.

    https://earthnewspaper.substack.com/

    Edit: Typo




  • Depends on who the “self” is. If you’re a Latino Trump supporter, absolutely. If you are working inside federal law enforcement to undo the structures that keep the country a livable, safe place for your family and your children, yes. If you are Trump, and your only way to stay out of prison and eternal infamy is to speedrun destroying any part of the government that’s loyal to the law instead of to you, and get a federal law enforcement agency in place that operates at a scale that can suppress the opposition sufficiently to keep you in power for the rest of your life, so you’re safe, I actually don’t think it is all that self-destructive.

    Trump is pretty much the only one it won’t hurt, though. On that I think you are correct.


  • Hm, it looks to me like it’s double posting.

    Currently, the code doesn’t use the Atom standard for how to detect duplicate stories, it just checks the URL. I’ve always gotten away with it so far, but Pubmed definitely changes the URL on articles when it updates the RSS feed, which means the bot will spam stories I think without end. Let me try to fix that and also take a look at how easy it is to get the abstract into the post content in some fairly-okay way.

    I’ll get back to you. But in the meantime, you might have some double posts, sorry about that.




  • Yeah, I have basically 0 formal knowledge about it beyond a vague impression and some pop-science stuff. I also know a woman who did an intense low-carb diet to lose weight and really enfeebled herself by sticking to it. When she first told me about it, I was alarmed and tried to tell her not to do it, and her response was more or less “Well I don’t really care about any of that, I want to be skinny.” So that’s hard to argue with I guess… she did achieve the goal to some extent, but she messed up her health also.

    I’m fine with anyone doing whatever they feel is right for their own situation of course. Even if I was basing this on knowing the full science, which I don’t, I probably wouldn’t try to tell anyone they’re not allowed to learn about it or talk about it and so on, just because I didn’t agree with it.

    Enjoy the RSS for it! Let me know if anything seems amiss or needs changes.


  • Yeah, I should probably add it to the sidebar. I should also add a sidebar. :-)

    I should say also: I’m pretty sure the keto diet is very bad for you. I’ve seen someone mess themselves up pretty badly by doing a low-carb diet to lose weight. I don’t have enough knowledge to really say, which is why I’m not getting involved in saying you shouldn’t run this community or have an RSS feed or anything, but that is my understanding, if you are interested in it.



  • Done. Let me know what you think. BTW, it’s also possible to add feeds or stop them or etc, on your own by sending messages to the bot, as long as you’re a moderator for the community where they’re getting sent to:

    https://ponder.cat/post/248105

    I’m especially interested in getting the abstract into the post.

    This is a little more complex, since it’s not completely trivial. The HTML that comes in via RSS has to get converted into Markdown for example. But I can take a look at it, there’s probably a way to do it and it’s probably a good improvement.






  • It’s not complicated. Too many of our congresspeople grew up in the days when Israel was well-organized and ruthless enough to send them to the electoral dumpster if there was even a whiff of lack of support, and so they learned the lesson and toed the line. I think the world, and the skill level of Israel’s operation, has changed dramatically since then, but as in so many other things, congress haven’t learned how it is now, and so a supermajority of politicians will simply do whatever Israel wants.

    I do think there’s a valid point that if the US government as a unified whole simply told Israel that they could either start abiding by international law or else start buying their own kit, they would after a short period of adjustment figure out a way to solve the “unsolvable” problem which they are currently perennially creating. Because the alternative would be the actual threat to their existence, from much more powerful regional players, that they claim they are suffering under from a handful of pitiful malnourished people throwing rockets. But I don’t know that getting the US government to make that realignment is in the hands of any single politician, or simple and easy to do.



  • On Friday, the Israeli security cabinet voted to approve a ceasefire and hostage release deal. It’s expected to pass the full cabinet later on Friday. Hamas supports the agreement, according to the New York Times.

    It’s “expected,” by me, to go in the toilet either before or after being formally approved, and then the killing continue. Have these serious scholars of the mideast not been paying attention to Netanyahu?

    Edit: It’s worth mentioning that there are stories in the Israeli press saying that Israel should agree to a cease fire, which would give them an opportunity to return home, rearm, rest and refit, and then they can get started again under some kind of pretext having gained some goodwill on the world stage. I’m a little bit skeptical that they even are willing to stop killing for that long, but if the ceasefire is a done deal, the killing is definitely set to get started again within a few months. Because why would it not?

    There is already, and will continue to be, debate over who secured a ceasefire deal: Trump or Biden. But early reporting strongly indicates it was the incoming president who made the difference. In Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent progressive newspaper, Amos Harel wrote bluntly, “negotiations would not have reached their final lap without Trump.” He added, “For years, people have been saying that Netanyahu is the sum of all his fears; it turns out that Trump scares him even more, perhaps justifiably so.”

    The Washington Post shared a similar perspective from an unnamed diplomat who said the recent negotiations had been “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Biden seemed to push back on Wednesday by saying, “This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring.” Yet, in doing so, he undercut his own point—underlining that it was the person pushing, not the plan, that had changed.

    If you assume this one is going to succeed, which is a weird thing to assume.

    One does not have to reconstrue Trump as a champion of Palestinians and their struggle for sovereignty to accept his role in securing a ceasefire. His record is clear. Trump’s first administration pushed forward a range of hardline pro-Israel policies that sidelined Palestinians—notably moving the US Embassy to Israel and pursuing the Abraham Accords. (Both were continued by the Biden administration.)

    Trump has now picked for Ambassador to Israel former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who once said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” There also isn’t a clear sense of what Netanyahu may have gotten at Palestinians’ and others’ expense in exchange for agreeing to the ceasefire. And from a Palestinian perspective, there are many reasons to be skeptical about how Trump will respond if Israel violates the ceasefire, refuses to take the steps in future phases of the agreement to end the war indefinitely, or takes extreme steps like trying to formally annex parts of the West Bank.

    Yes. I completely agree with all of that. Why then did you write a couple of paragraphs from the point of view that Netanyahu is scared of Trump giving him consequences? I actually won’t argue with you about the parts excoriating Biden for not doing more. But the idea that Trump is the one who’s decided to give consequences, and that fixed Israel and Palestine when others couldn’t, is a incredibly stupid idea that I’m now seeing for the second time in the press.

    This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.

    It’s tangential to this main point, but this is a weirdly bookish way of saying it. The facts are pretty straightforward: There are around 46,000 dead people whose specific identities are known, and at least a hundred thousand and probably many hundred thousand who are dead, but the information isn’t neatly organized, because the country is in ruins. You don’t need to make it sound like there’s any ambiguity about that second thing.