Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

It’s safe to assume that one could graph the atrocities committed by the Israeli military, duplicate it, shift it a day or two down the timeline, and one would get the graph of news articles censored by the Israeli military.

Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…

Work toward an eventual full withdrawal from NATO and an overt and full political and military alliance with Russia.

I’m not joking.

Cadbury Mini Eggs.

And any decent quality or better saltwater taffy.

They never really did.

It was all, always, just about themselves. They claimed to love the country because they just saw it as a rightful extension of themselves, and they claimed to love democracy because they just saw it as the process by which they got what they wanted.

Now that they’re faced with the fact that the country necessarily also accommodates other people and that democracy means that other people can get what they want, they have no reason left to pretend that they ever really valued either one.

So they’re instead diving headfirst into xenophobic fascism, in the hope that they can recreate a world in which the country exists only for them and the government serves only their interests.

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn’t be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they’re fined less than they made off of it, it’s not even really a fine. It’s just the government taking a cut of the action.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.

He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn’t been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they’d inevitably broken, then try them for that.

That’s how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.

And it’s guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.

The US economy will be much worse than it is already, the country will be at war and the government will be cracking down on civil unrest.

Wrong about what? I don’t even get what the point is supposed to be.

Are you saying that people transition from Linux to Windows? That seems obviously backwards.

Are you saying that Linux is female and Windows is male? That’s not even coherent.

What am I supposed to be trying to prove wrong?

Why would Gazans attack a pier being built to being them aid?

It’s far FAR more likely that the attacks were carried out by Israelis. It wouldn’t be the first time they attacked people trying to provide aid to the Gazans. Hell - it wouldn’t even be the first time this month.

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Yes - it is sociopathic.

That’s not a coincidence.

The other answers mostly sum it up - it was initially made illegal primarily as a way to establish an “other” with which to frighten conservatives.

There’s another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet though that I’ve long thought is relevant - is part of the reason that marijuana specifically was for so long (and still is in some quarters) so condemned.

Imagine you’re a corrupt politician, and you want to sell your constituents on the idea of going to war in the Middle East (so you can collect some bribes from defense contractors and oil companies) or instituting mandatory sentencing (so you can collect some bribes from prison contractors) or cutting taxes on the wealthy (so you can collect bribes from rich people and corporations) or any of the other, similar things that corrupt politicians want to do

Who would you rather try selling that idea to? A bunch of pot smokers or a bunch of drinkers?

I think part of the issue is that marijuana appeals to a part of the population that really is, to corrupt politicians and their cronies and patrons, “undesirable.” When they want to get the people all fired up in support of their latest bullshit, they want somebody with a beer in their hand, drunkenly shouting, “Yeah! Kick their asses!” Not somebody with a joint in their hand, muzzily saying, “Hold on a minute - you want to do what?”