As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the fact that the law and the courts have discussed the fact that social media algorithms exist and do things, instead of treating social media like some sort of magical box where users post and read other posts and it is entirely user-driven.
This is, of course, true, but it has a bunch of interesting implications if we are acknowledging it under the law. Here's the relevant parg section 230 of the CDA:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph
You may notice something in that in #2. It talks about how restricting access isn't legal to sue based on. But it doesn't say a damn thing about promoting access. That is a perfectly valid thing to sue about...about the fact you were demoted below those people. (And not for any of the valid reasons for restricting availability, even assuming that would count as 'restricting availability'.)
In other words, you can sue the algorithm if you don't like it. Now that we finally legally admit there is one and it is altering what content is presented.
--
But wait, it's a little worse. #1 isn't the absolute statement it pretends. It doesn't allow a newspaper's web site, for example, to not be liable for a slanderous editorial piece about someone, and certainly not someone they paid. But they are not liable for comments under that article.
(Hey, is Twitter paying for posts that have high engagement them paying posters for content and thus legally liable for it...you know, a question for another time. We're actually talking about social media in general, but Twitter is walking some _really_ stupid ground there.)
Now, courts have generally been okay with publishers manipulating user-created information without them losing immunity. But this is because, again, the courts really didn't acknowledge such as thing as the algorithm, that this would be some sort of deliberately coded result, and what they looked at was generally very small amounts like 'promoted posts' which generally were just publishes promoting things they thought were useful. Not 'the algorithm', a system-wise decision machine.
Here's a congressional research service looking at some of these issues, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306 and of note is this at the end of page 2:
Section 230(c)(1) immunity may bar a lawsuit if the claim would treat a provider or user of an “interactive computer service” as “the publisher or speaker” of another’s content. As courts have held, the converse of this rule is that a service provider can be liable for content that the service creates or helps develop. Generally, courts have said that a service’s ability to control the content that others post on its website is not enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a content developer. In some circumstances, a service provider may retain immunity even when it makes small editorial changes to another’s content. Some courts have employed a “material contribution” test to determine if Section 230(c)(1) applies, holding that a service provider may be subject to liability if it “materially contribute[d] to the illegality” of the disputed content. Others have said that service providers may be liable if they “specifically encourage[] development of what is offensive about the content.”
Read that, um, last line carefully. The algorithm does, pretty clearly, contribute to the sort of content on a platform, that's literally one of the stated purposes of the algorithm. The algorithm doesn't have to be _designed_ to contribute to, let's say, harassment and threats against someone, but if it _contributes_ to that happening by the way it tries to drive 'engagement', it is not insane to try that legal theory out in court if you are, in fact, harassed. (Just like if someone had _manually_ done that by promoting user content to get someone harassed.)
I don't know if it would win, but it seems meaningful that we now operating in a world where the laws and courts are acknowledging that legal decisions can be based on the abstract 'algorithm' and what it does and who controls it. Someone is going to start looking at this and going 'Wait, does this algorithm expose the company to legal liability?'...either the company itself or people ready to sue it.
And I stand by what I said. If I had a friend who painted something like this, my eyes would bug out of my head.
Your eyes would also bug out of your head if your friend created a completely photorealistic image that, with exact pixel-perfect detail, captured someone's image.
For some reason, you don't seem to think a camera doing that thing makes the camera an artist.
Doing something easily that human find difficult != art
But let’s take your criticism to heart… would it only be a masterpiece if… where’s your baseline? Maybe I could fiddle with some AI and figure something out and get closer after spending 10 minutes on it, as opposed to 30 seconds.
Instead, I suggest you fiddle with taking a stock photo (A thing which a person would find insanely difficult to create without a machine) and run it though Photoshop filters (Applying a bunch of computations which is insanely difficult without a machine), which will get you something that looks exactly as 'artistic' as this, and won't have a bunch of exceedingly weird errors in it.
Is that just as much 'art'? A stock photo and a Photoshop filter?
I seem to remember 'art style' as the thing that has impressed you both times you talked about AI, which rather implies to me you do not understand how it is literally is just a trivial filter.
Jaybird, half those boats do not have people in them. There is also some sort of massive collision going on in the bottom right of the image. The boat in the center right has an impossible perspective where we are somehow seeing inside the far end.
All the lamp reflections are very obviously wrong, either slightly offset or not the same place as the originating light. Sometimes not even there. The background and the mountains have no reflection, the lights in the background have no reflection. The sunrise/sunset has too _much_ of a reflection that goes too far, flat reflections cannot be bigger than the thing reflected.
Also, are those dark spaces at the sides of the top treetops or space? They have stars in them that look exactly the same as the dark space at the top (Which is space), but also have tree trumps going up to them.
Also, and this seems sort of obvious, this isn't at night. It's at dusk or dawn. This is a very obvious error where the thing didn't even draw what you asked for. The boats also are not 'going past' us, they are going...all directions. And it's honestly not clear this is a river. It could hypothetically be a river, getting wider, but when you talk about 'boats sailing past on a river', you usually are wanting a _perpendicular_ view of the river.
All of these errors, BTW, are objective physical issues with the rendered world. The art itself is also crap, but I'm not even going to get into that because it's very subjective...but this art isn't art at all.
Literally the only reason this looks like 'art' is the silk-screen painting filter, a thing that a) is a Photoshop effect, and b) completely hiding a lot of blemishes in the work by making it effectively 'lower resolution'. You can make anything look like a work of art by _running it through a filter that causes us to associate it with a form of art_. I could take a randomly-aimed picture of a cat and do that.
Of course if that’s what we’re going with I’d expect some quid pro quo concessions to the public from tech, like IDK, prohibiting Elon from playing footsies with the Chinese.
Oh, there's all sorts of stuff we'd have to prohibit if we decided to say the industry is of strategic importance.
For one thing, we have almost no _chip fab_ in this country. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes almost all of them in the world, mostly in Taiwan. They make 90% of 'advanced chips', like processors. One company. In Taiwan.
It's a good thing that there is absolutely nothing could disrupt a supply from Taiwan. Absolutely no sort of geopolitical instability with a US political rival there that could happen with that place!
Anyway, we're supposed to be fixing that, there was a law passed back in 2022, called the CHIPS & Science Act, with incentives for building chip fab in the US, causing a bunch of new plants built by *checks note* Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Wait), GlobalFoundries, owned by Mubadala Investment Company, aka, the United Arab Emirates, and Intel, which...actually is an American company, so hey. One out of three ain't bad.
And of course there are some other chip fabs already in the US, like Samsung. (I mean, at least that's _South Korea_, and it is very implausible we could end up in any sort of real disagreement with them. *checks earpiece* Wait, their president's been arrested? Is that about the relationship with us? Or we did overthrow him? *pause* No to both?! That isn't anything to do with us at all?! Wow, that's...unexpected. Carry on then.)
The US is actually incredibly bad at actually doing things to secure things of strategic importance. Semiconductors is an industry we've literally tried to pass laws to fix this in, and it's resulted in bunch of foreign-owned plants in the US, and I don't really feel like that's a logical solution, unless we're prepared to suddenly start nationalizing industries when they decide to shut down operations.
I’m not sure any tech entrepreneur is able to make the case for H1B expansion, or maybe even the case for the way the program exists today, in a way that’s going to be convincing in MAGAland.
It would be nearly impossible for anyone to make the case for tech H1B _at all_, because it is an extraordinarily stupid policy to have. It is deliberately creating both an underclass of less powerful employees who are competing for American jobs, which is a thing that is bad for literally everyone except wealthy business owners.
And the only real possible justification is to argue we need it, but you can't use the 'We need immigrants to pick our food' nonsense that usually is done for other immigrants. You have to use, uh, 'They are smarter than Americans', which absolutely no one is going to vote for.
The problem is, Republicans now have to do that justification.
It also would have been hard for Democrats to do it, although maybe they could have threaded the needle by yammering about 'opportunity' and stuff. Republicans cannot do that.
I think a lot of people are subconsciously operating on the idea 'MAGA oppose it, and for xenophobic and often racist reasons, ergo it must be good', but...no. It's not.
To put it another way, when Elon Musk went crazy in the early days of Twitter and tried to get people to sign 'I will work myself to death to pay off the debt Musk incurred by borrowing to buy this company' crazy and probably illegal oaths, and a huge chuck of his workforce quit...the only people left were the H1B visa holders.
Without H1B visa, it is entirely possible that Twitter would have _literally failed_. Not as a company, but as a piece of software. Because no one who had a choice wanted to work there anymore. (And a reminder they didn't quit for political reasons, at that exact moment he was pretending to be apolitical and buying Twitter because 'They're lying about bots' or something. The whole Trumpism thing started months later.)
I personally think if you make your place of work so horrific that half the workforce walks out the door, it isn't a great thing if the only reason the rest of it is staying in place is they will be _deported_ if they quit.
Israel and the pre-Israel militias that became Israel's military killed 15,000 Arabs and displaced 750,000 Arabs in a single year, forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense.
Surrounding Arab nations, in response to this, had some violent riots that killed ~500 Jews over a decade or so, and had legal changes and threats of violence that resulted in 900,000 Jews eventually leaving them over four or five decades, usually forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense
You may notice the first was _entirely_ violence, very rapid violence, resulting in a lot of deaths, whereas the second was some small amount of violence, a implied terroristic threat of more violence in the future, and mostly just a bunch of laws and restrictions that made it very clear Jews were unwelcome, or were legally required to leave.
Again, the second is _still_ ethnic cleansing. It's reprehensible. No one should have their government say 'People like you are not allowed to live in this country, you have to move, and we're keeping your house', or have the worry of 'People occasionally get very angry at people like us and kill a dozen', especially when its clear the government doesn't _particularity_ mind that, even if it's not official government action.
But pretending they are morally equivalent is nonsense.
There are some part of the laws (There's actually multiple laws), like foreign aid, that can be waived, and in fact have been waived for other countries. They have not been waived for Israel, so it's actually still illegal.
There are parts that cannot be waived, and those have to do with supplying weapons.
And Israel has not 'officially' tested nukes in the sense that they have not admitted it and the US State Department has very pointedly refused to say anything about it. There is no actual doubt they were behind the nuclear explosions off the coast of South Africa, and there were actually three explosions.
BTW, working with and having a military alliance with South Africa in 1979 is, um, rather deplorable behavior, South Africa was already a become a pariah nation by that point for Apartheid, including a complete arms embargo by the UN in 1977, including nuclear material, but is something Israel indeed did.
The funniest document to come out of all that is this:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/05/23/Peres-letter.pdf
(In case anyone is wondering about South Africa, when it became clear they were going to overthrow Apartheid, they dismantled their nuclear weapons, and signed the NPT. They're fine now under the law.)
People say H-1B visas are bad because they give employers too much leverage over workers (for the record, you actually can change employers on H-1B; there’s paperwork, but no lottery or quota)
Being able to change jobs is nothing. That requires you having already located a job and already been hired by them.
The leverage is from the threat of getting let go. You stop having a job, you have 60 days to find another. Which is, of course, harder for people on a H-1B visas than other people, processing itself can take a month or longer, and they have to find a company that not only will do the paperwork but pay the application fee.
60-days is actually pretty damn short to find a job regardless.
So what the anti-death penalty want is not something that Biden is capable of doing.
Their ultimate goal, yes.
If, in some unlikely universe, literally every US president from now on held the same position as they do and commuted the sentence of everyone that was ever put on death row, hypothetically they'd 'get what they wanted' (Well, except for state executions.), but that's just silly. You generally want political changes done via laws and not subject to the whim of the president.
To the extent that there is a belief system that is represented by this act, it’s fair enough to call the belief system onto the carpet and judge it.
Yeah, but as far as anyone can tell, that's just _Biden's_ belief system. That was the point I was making, that this isn't some 'statement of the anti-death penalty people, who have decided to carve exceptions'.
Incidentally, the belief system was actually stated by Biden, where he said the commutations were 'consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder'.
'Hate-motivated mass murder' is rather vague, but...honestly, a lot of people on death row are 'normal' murderers who just got really unlucky in the court system, with people who committed identical crimes often getting 15 years. It's almost totally random. I'm honestly not sure if there's anyone on the list of 37 that would be borderline.
The NPT forbids selling any nuclear tech to any country that has not signed. Taha is not what is relevant.
The US law called the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act bars selling weapons to nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT.
The problem for Israel—and a key reason for the secrecy involving the tests—was the Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act. Passed by Congress in 1977, the amendment aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states. It mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive US sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. The nuclear test was also a clear violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, to which Israel was a party.
Under US law, Israel must be banned from receiving its annual package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs. In a 2016 Haaretz column, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, laid out the penalties: “The sanctions for detonating a nuclear explosion are tough: termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, termination of sales of defense equipment and military financing, prohibition of loans from US banks, and more. In other words, if the U.S. government were to conclude Israel detonated a nuclear explosion after 1977, the law, unless waived, would effectively end all US aid to Israel.” Newell Highsmith, who spent three decades with the State Department and was responsible for legal issues related to nonproliferation, agrees. “Glenn Amendment sanctions for detonation or receipt of a nuclear explosive device have been viewed as a ‘death sentence’ because of the breadth of sanctions and because there is no presidential waiver,” he wrote last year for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
There is no possible waiver and the sanctions are _ridiculously high_ under US law, if you detonate a nuclear device (after 1977) without having signed the NPT.
Israel detonated a nuclear device September 22, 1979. Everyone knows it. The US basically admits it. But...refuses to actually admit it. The Department of Energy (You know, the nuclear people) apparently have rules where employees and contractors cannot mention this fact, they treat it as somehow classified.
although my impression was the Palestinians didn’t get serious about peace until the settlements forced their hand.
...what are you talking about? The first settlement was basically _immediately_ after Israel controlled the territory. It was like six months or something, I can't be bothered to look it up.
Claiming that the Palestinians weren’t involved in derailing Oslo ignores that Israel walking away from security tends to result in more terrorism.
It...hasn't, actually. Israel withdrawing from Gaza resulted in a massive dip in violence, or at least death, as Hamas was no longer able to pull off suicide bombings because _they couldn't reach Israelis_, and had to resort to extremely inefficient rocket attacks, and had to team up with Iran (Who they hadn't worked with before) to even manage those!
And this was with Israel literally handing an entire territory over to Hamas, a thing that would not happened had they withdrawn starting _a decade earlier_.
Big picture there is absolutely a problem with lone wolf Jews engaging in terrorism and violence. However their counter parts among the Palestinians are way more organized and can even win elections from this sort of thing.
It really is amazing to watch the mental filter you have on, where violence _by the IDF_ against Palestinians in Palestine, doesn't count as organized violence, presumably because it's by the government, whereas violence by Hamas against Israelis in Israeli is organized violence...despite them 'winning elections' on that.
Fun fact: Neither of them are the government of the territory or people they are harming. Both of them, however, are 'governments'. So it's somewhat hard to see the difference.
And to be clear, Israel is neither legally the government of the Gaza String _or_ the West Bank. The West Bank has a government called the Palestinian Authority, created by a joint agreement between the PLO and Israel. (We can argue whether they or Hamas are the government of Gaza, if Hamas 'officially' won a civil war and took part of the country...but it's not Israel either way.) Israel, as an occupying power, only allows the PA partial civil control over part of its own territory, and illegally took back a lot of control in 2005. (Instead of, as I said, doing a withdrawal process that was supposed to end in 1999.)
To be even more clear, the PA has mostly not objected to the actions of Israel because they are incredibly corrupt and essentially bribed by the US and other countries not to object, and they have failed to hold elections for almost two decades at this point so the Palestinians can replace them.
But the PA's inaction can't actually make the actions of Israel legal.
...over the thing that their country agreed to do without any conditions, and then did not do?
Yes. Only they have agency over that.
Palestinian terrorist attacks and suicide bombings didn’t sour Israelis towards peace?
...only Hamas has agency, apparently.
You know, there was a perfectly functional way to stop suicide bombing that worked incredibly well from 2005 onward. It was called a) building an actual border wall, and b) not having Israelis on the wrong side of the wall.
This, of course, is incredibly hard to do with settlements, although Israel eventually did it, mostly by barring Palestinians from large sections of the West Bank.
It would have been easier to just _withdrawal_ like they were supposed to, on the timetable they had agreed to.
Oh, let me guess 'Hamas would have just started doing rockets earlier'. Well, no, they wouldn't have, because they were not, in fact, part of the government then. In fact, that wouldn't have been impossible had Israel not deliberately _handed Gaza over to Hamas_.
The aftermath of 'Israel's war' _was_ ethnic cleansing. There is literally no way other to describe 'Removing 750,000 from an area based on their ethnicity so there are less people of that ethnicity living there relative to other people'. It is basically the _definition_ of ethnic cleaning.
Arab states kicking out their Jews was always ethnic cleansing.
And not to defend those Arab countries too much, but they tended to do it somewhat slower and saner and via some sort of legal process and didn't kill 15,000 people while doing it, unlike Israel. The casualties, as far as I can tell, are in the hundreds, despite Arab countries expelling ~900,000 Jews vs. Israel and Jewish paramilitaries expelling ~750,000 Arabs. I want to be clear, it's still ethnic cleansing, but it is at least a good deal less bloody.
Granted, the number widely varies depending on what you count. How far in the past are we counting? Are we counting things that are very obviously due to European colonialism, including actual Na.zis controlling the country, and not any sort of 'Arab' decision?
For an actual example of deaths that would clearly count as part of this, there was about 80 Jews killed in a riot in Yemen in 1947, a riot explicitly about Israel. 14 killed in an anti-Jewish riot in Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1945. There are a half dozen other events like that in a few different places, 75 dead in Syria, but it's like...countable. A few individual events, riots, where some of number of Jews died. I don't know the full amount, there probably were a bunch of small groups we don't know about, but if we assume the _biggest_ are the ones people talk about, and we're throwing around numbers like 80 and 75 and 14 as the largest for some countries, it's hard to see how it could be more than a thousand, and I think about half that is a more reasonable guess.
That ethnic cleansing did not end up with 15,000 people dead, in a single year, which is what Israeli's ethnic cleansing did.
Again, not defending Arab's countries, just pointing out how _insanely violent_ the Nakba was, and how you keep downplaying it and doing whataboutism of Arab countries did it too!'. Just wanted to point out Israel 'escorted people at gunpoint and killed a lot of them in a very short period of time', whereas a lot of the Arab ethnic cleansing was 'a few violent riots and some economic oppression and Jews, over a period of decades, ended up on flights leaving the country, either because they were required by law or they could just read the writing on the wall'. Not all ethnic cleansing is identical.
Or to put it another way: Israel and a bunch of Arab countries all committed ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Israel, and the armed militias that existed before Israel and were turned into its military, also committed a f*ckton of war crimes while doing that ethnic cleansing.
Normally we’d have some sort of peace agreement after the war ends which includes national borders.
While the countries might not have 'formal' borders, they do in fact have clearly defined areas areas that they are supposed to control, with Israel slowly withdrawing from, in five years, aka, by May 1999, under the Oslo Accords and related accords, treaties that Israel signed.
They have not done that, and in fact exist in areas they are not supposed to exist.
And no, this is not the fault of Palestinians. We can argue why negotiations stalled near the end of that five year period, whose fault that was, but that gave Israel no right to stall with their withdrawal, the withdrawal was not dependent on those negotiations.
Yet they did stop them withdrawal, and in fact later reversed some of them, due to political opposition within _Israel_ for the treaties _they had signed_. (Including a far-right Israeli assassinating their own prime minister for working on the Accords.)
For what it’s worth, I do think that Biden’s act is representative of a large swath of the anti-death penalty folks out there.
It's not, you can actually tell by the name 'anti-death penalty' as to what their political position is. They are against _having_ the death penalty as punishment. At all. Against it existing as a punishment for crime.
Something like the pardons and commutations?
What Biden does or does not do is a good reason to criticize Biden, I guess. Or his advisors, sure. Not 'anti-death penalty folks', which Biden doesn't really claim to be...or maybe he does, and if he does, well, he's a hypocrite, but that's just him.
Where I think you have been confused is that the anti-death penalty people have minorly criticized him for falling slightly short, while praising him for practically doing like 95% of the best he could do.(1) You might not know this because the anti-death penalty organizations get absolutely no airtime.
They aren't going to run some sort of massive campaign to attack him for not going all the way.
You know that's normally how politics works, right? If a politician hand someone a political win of 95%, they don't attack him. They might not award him any awards, or maybe they will, but they're not going to attack him. (In addition to the question of 'What the hell is the point of attacking Biden anyway?')
1) A reminder, although I just said it: The goal of the anti-death penalty people is not 'a politician sometimes commutes the sentence of everyone on death row'. The goal is 'Capital punishment literally no longer exists as a punishment on the books' and maybe even 'is barred for states by a law at the Federal level'. That's not something the president can do, though, that requires either a supreme court decision (unlikely) or legislature.
Oh, and I guess I should point the difference between 'getting the thing you can practically get' vs 'getting what you want'.
There are plenty of times pro-life organizations will support a bill with rape or incest exemptions despite them not approving them. Likewise, it would be fine for anti-death-penalty organizations to support a bill that massively reduces and reforms the death penalty, but does not end it.
If you completely oppose X, and a bill is sitting there that _mostly_ stops X but sometimes allows it, it is entirely reasonable to say 'I do not like these exceptions, but it is better than nothing.'
The problem arises when they, or politicians who claim to follow their philosophy, are not willing to state the actual conclusion and instead fall short and cave and make exceptions because they think the conclusion would be unpopular.
If you are claiming that something is murdering kids, but women who have very bad crimes happen to them to put them in that position should be _allowed_ to murder kids, you, uh, are really obviously a hypocrite and a lair...or a complete sociopath. But probably just a liar who does not actually believe it is murder, even if you have manage to convince yourself that you do believe it.
Likewise, if you are claiming the death penalty is immoral, that the power of the state should not be allowed to end anyone's life, that it is immoral to purposefully kill someone...except, like, that one dude over there who did the most bad things, he's fine to kill...you're a liar or an idiot.
This is admittedly somewhat trickery WRT a lot of death penalty opposition, which, as you can tell by this very page, is often grounded in more practical complaints, not morality. It would be, I guess, possible to say 'The death penalty is apply inconsistently and erratically and in a racist and classist manner and costs a lot and doesn't really do much, but this _particular_ guy really did deserve it' or even a most consistent 'the death penalty should only be for terrorism'...but no one's actually arguing that. Biden might have randomly thought that, and acted on it, but, like, we're not Biden.
No he didn't, for a very simple reason: Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not have to reflectively defend everything their leadership says.
What we have an example here is of what one guy believes. That guy was elected president, so it's entirely reasonable to say 'The blame for this (Whatever that would be) is on Democrats', but it's not some sort of reasoned implementation of Democratic policy...there are plenty of Democrats and people on the actual left asserting everyone's sentence should be commuted, some people with 'most of them should be commuted, but it's fine to leave some there' (Aka, what Biden did), and others who basically don't have an opinion and...honestly, I'm not really seeing any 'No one's sentence should be commuted', there's not a huge pro-death penalty side over here, but they could exist.
But this isn't policy. This is something Biden chose to do, by himself. No one else has to defend it, because it's not a policy position. People with a policy position of 'The death penalty should be abolished' have no problem continuing to hold that position, they have not been revealed to be hypocrites or anything.
And even _that_ wouldn't be hypocrisy unless this commutation was, like, their policy being implemented. Like if Biden stepped up and said 'I have commuted the sentence of these people and left the others on death row following the guidelines of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who said not to commute the sentence of those last three guys because they're Really Bad and deserve killing.'. That would be stupid hypocrisy and undermine any argument they had.(1)
You know, in exactly the same way that a party that wants to outlaw something, something they call murder, but clearly do not think of as murder, because they're willing to let some people do it. That is them having to build a policy, and they put loopholes in it allow some murder. It is perfectly fine to call that out as what it is: They do not actually believe the things they are saying.
1) That organization make a practical argument against the death penalty, not moral, but it would still undermine them if their position is 'the death penalty is done right ~5% of the time'. That weakens the abolition side quite a lot and just argues for reform.
Back in 2023, Larry Nassar got shivved in prison. What was the most common response?
You keep doing these things that is just vaguely 'People had this response to one thing, and people had an entirely different response to something else'.
Firstly, perhaps most obviously, people feel different about the power of the state doing something in their own name vs. something just happening. Which is something a lot of people pretend desperately to never understand, notice how opposition to arming Israel is met with 'You don't oppose Hamas and they're as bad', and everyone just calmly says 'We probably shouldn't arm Hamas either!' There is a difference between something I, or someone claiming to represent me and the system I supposedly have a voice in and a level of control doing something, and just...some dude doing something.
Or to put it in a way conservatives should understand: There is a different between the government doing something and private citizens doing something.
But secondly, there's absolutely no evidence those are the same people. Some people voiced opinions that Nassar getting killed was a good thing. Those people made noise, and you heard them. And some people voice opinions (In a more formal and louder way, cause this is a real political position) that the death penalty is bad, and you hear them, in fact, they are part of a political debate.
Those are probably not the same people. Some of them might even be part of the same 'group' of people, like the Democrats, but that doesn't make them the actual same people.
It's also very interesting the crazy spectrum that exists there. Anthony Battle raped one person and murdered two.
Now, this is, uh, very very bad, but I promise you, people do not _normally_ get the death penalty for that. A lot of people do not even get 'prison without the chance of parole' for that!
He notable was sentenced to death just for the prison guard murder, in 1997, after already being in prison. This is...kind of crazy, honestly. There are people who have killed prison guards out on the street 27 years later, and he was on death row.
And, look, maybe people feel those crimes deserve it, but if they do, the system is just completely broken in the other direction, because the vast vast vast majority of people convicted for that level of stuff are not sentenced to death.
The death penalty makes absolutely no sense when it is so erratically applied. We just pick one random guy...often, it must be pointed out, a very poor one who cannot afford a lawyer, often is a minority, and just...sentence that guy as hard as humanly possible, and then spend decades trying to figure out how to actually do the sentence.
Hey, do people know that between the start of the modern Federal death penalty in 1998 and it being paused in 2021, almost half of all Federal death sentences came from Missouri, Texas, and Virginia? And 10 of the actual 16 executed. Those states, put together, have only 15% of the US population. And...both Texas and Missouri are moderately high in violent crimes, 12th and 8th respectively per 100,000, but that's not that high, and Virginia is way down at 42th. That feels...weird, doesn't it? This is the Federal death penalty, I won't say it should be identical across the states, but should it be that different? (Is the reason that Virginia is on that list is that Washington is right there?)
Meanwhile other people are getting 5-10 years for a murder, and even the absolute worst murdery ones are getting life without parole.
I have no idea why pointing out that Na.zis were elected legitimately is relevant to this discussion.
Yeah, they often are.
But, hey, good job blaming immigrants, you'll fit right in. Not with Germany in general, there was a huge outrage when the AfD was found to be trying to plan to deport a bunch of these refugees and other no-sufficiently-German people, but you really just need a time machine to solve that problem. Just set it far enough back.
What has actually happened in Germany is that the AfD managed to make a very small backlash to the refugee situation, but revelations of just how Na.zi-ish the AfD has resulted in a backlash against them and a defeat at the polls.
What is going to probably happen is that the major parties are going to moderate a bit on just how many refugees they accept and try to get other countries to accept more instead.
No, I'm pointing out that you find 'Trump is Hitler' more absurd than 'These people are Na.zis', so you keep rewriting what people say into 'Trump is Hitler'.
No one is Hitler. No one will ever be Hitler except Hitler. People cannot be other people, and there will always be some way comparisons between two people do not work.
Na.zism is, however, an _ideology_, and like all political ideologies is has various implementations, some of which _currently exist in the world_ and people follow. These people include the AfD, and they include Elon Musk, and they include a lot of other people in rather prominent positions on the right. (We _already had_ this discussion about Sebastian Gorka, who is, again, wearing fake medals meant to honor Na.zi Hungarian collaborators issued by 'Historical Vitézi
Rend', a Neo-Na.zi group!)
This is why you keep rewriting references, so you do not have to recognize the _actual Na.zis_ running around. You can pretend everyone is just making crazy over-the-top claims that someone is actually Hitler.
Even when we're not even talking about Trump! We were talking about Elon Musk, an 'advisor' to the President-Elect, openly supporting a neo-Na.zi political party. Do you have anything _actually_ to say about that? Does that not seem like a problem?
...what an incredibly weird comment. It's impossible for you to honestly mean it, as you have spent weeks harping about how a comparison between Trump and Hitler is absurd, and yet there's not any other way to take it.
And I will, again, point you that you are the first to mention Hitler, a thing to do to try to make arguments into Reductio ad Hitlerum. Saul, very correctly, merely pointed out that AfG was a hairbreath from the Na.zi party...about as legally close as parties are allowed in Germany, in fact, and is under investigation by Germany for being an extremist group, and could actually be barred from participating in elections.
Hell, AfG was kicked out of Identity and Democracy, which is a European-level far-right political 'party' (Well, group of national parties, that team up together for EU Parliment elections), which _they themselves_ had helped found back in 2019, because they attended an extremist meeting in 2023 with 'Identitarians' (Aka, the pan-Euporean version of neo-Na.zis), and the Identity and Democracy group is trying to be very, very clear that they are not Na.zis.
Now, that's Germany. Here in the US, we don't stop Na.zis, at least not native born ones (We did revoke some naturalized citizenships from Germanys during WWII and arrest those guys.) from running for office. (The only party we've done that with is the Communist Party.) So I'm sure some people will have a problem with Germany's actions there, or possibly barring a political party from running for office (Unless they are filthy communists) but that doesn't really change their determination that 'Hey, these people and group ideology are a very very close to Na.zis'. Like, we can assume that Germany can identify Na.zis, right? As can the rest of Europe?
Hey, hey, _both_ parties are a gerontocracy clinging to power so tightly, and at the expense of any other aim, that they ran a septuagenarian in serious cognitive decline for president, twice.
One is _also_ a proto-fascist cult of personality that’s currently being led from behind the scenes by the son of a South African emerald dealer. Two things can be true at once.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “SCOTUS Upholds TikTok Ban: Read It For Yourself”
As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the fact that the law and the courts have discussed the fact that social media algorithms exist and do things, instead of treating social media like some sort of magical box where users post and read other posts and it is entirely user-driven.
This is, of course, true, but it has a bunch of interesting implications if we are acknowledging it under the law. Here's the relevant parg section 230 of the CDA:
You may notice something in that in #2. It talks about how restricting access isn't legal to sue based on. But it doesn't say a damn thing about promoting access. That is a perfectly valid thing to sue about...about the fact you were demoted below those people. (And not for any of the valid reasons for restricting availability, even assuming that would count as 'restricting availability'.)
In other words, you can sue the algorithm if you don't like it. Now that we finally legally admit there is one and it is altering what content is presented.
--
But wait, it's a little worse. #1 isn't the absolute statement it pretends. It doesn't allow a newspaper's web site, for example, to not be liable for a slanderous editorial piece about someone, and certainly not someone they paid. But they are not liable for comments under that article.
(Hey, is Twitter paying for posts that have high engagement them paying posters for content and thus legally liable for it...you know, a question for another time. We're actually talking about social media in general, but Twitter is walking some _really_ stupid ground there.)
Now, courts have generally been okay with publishers manipulating user-created information without them losing immunity. But this is because, again, the courts really didn't acknowledge such as thing as the algorithm, that this would be some sort of deliberately coded result, and what they looked at was generally very small amounts like 'promoted posts' which generally were just publishes promoting things they thought were useful. Not 'the algorithm', a system-wise decision machine.
Here's a congressional research service looking at some of these issues, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306 and of note is this at the end of page 2:
Read that, um, last line carefully. The algorithm does, pretty clearly, contribute to the sort of content on a platform, that's literally one of the stated purposes of the algorithm. The algorithm doesn't have to be _designed_ to contribute to, let's say, harassment and threats against someone, but if it _contributes_ to that happening by the way it tries to drive 'engagement', it is not insane to try that legal theory out in court if you are, in fact, harassed. (Just like if someone had _manually_ done that by promoting user content to get someone harassed.)
I don't know if it would win, but it seems meaningful that we now operating in a world where the laws and courts are acknowledging that legal decisions can be based on the abstract 'algorithm' and what it does and who controls it. Someone is going to start looking at this and going 'Wait, does this algorithm expose the company to legal liability?'...either the company itself or people ready to sue it.
On “Short Status Report on the Abilities of AI”
Your eyes would also bug out of your head if your friend created a completely photorealistic image that, with exact pixel-perfect detail, captured someone's image.
For some reason, you don't seem to think a camera doing that thing makes the camera an artist.
Doing something easily that human find difficult != art
Instead, I suggest you fiddle with taking a stock photo (A thing which a person would find insanely difficult to create without a machine) and run it though Photoshop filters (Applying a bunch of computations which is insanely difficult without a machine), which will get you something that looks exactly as 'artistic' as this, and won't have a bunch of exceedingly weird errors in it.
Is that just as much 'art'? A stock photo and a Photoshop filter?
I seem to remember 'art style' as the thing that has impressed you both times you talked about AI, which rather implies to me you do not understand how it is literally is just a trivial filter.
"
Jaybird, half those boats do not have people in them. There is also some sort of massive collision going on in the bottom right of the image. The boat in the center right has an impossible perspective where we are somehow seeing inside the far end.
All the lamp reflections are very obviously wrong, either slightly offset or not the same place as the originating light. Sometimes not even there. The background and the mountains have no reflection, the lights in the background have no reflection. The sunrise/sunset has too _much_ of a reflection that goes too far, flat reflections cannot be bigger than the thing reflected.
Also, are those dark spaces at the sides of the top treetops or space? They have stars in them that look exactly the same as the dark space at the top (Which is space), but also have tree trumps going up to them.
Also, and this seems sort of obvious, this isn't at night. It's at dusk or dawn. This is a very obvious error where the thing didn't even draw what you asked for. The boats also are not 'going past' us, they are going...all directions. And it's honestly not clear this is a river. It could hypothetically be a river, getting wider, but when you talk about 'boats sailing past on a river', you usually are wanting a _perpendicular_ view of the river.
All of these errors, BTW, are objective physical issues with the rendered world. The art itself is also crap, but I'm not even going to get into that because it's very subjective...but this art isn't art at all.
Literally the only reason this looks like 'art' is the silk-screen painting filter, a thing that a) is a Photoshop effect, and b) completely hiding a lot of blemishes in the work by making it effectively 'lower resolution'. You can make anything look like a work of art by _running it through a filter that causes us to associate it with a form of art_. I could take a randomly-aimed picture of a cat and do that.
On “The Jack Smith Report: Read It For Yourself”
This is actually half the report. Or one of two reports, whatever.
On “The Shakedown”
Oh, there's all sorts of stuff we'd have to prohibit if we decided to say the industry is of strategic importance.
For one thing, we have almost no _chip fab_ in this country. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes almost all of them in the world, mostly in Taiwan. They make 90% of 'advanced chips', like processors. One company. In Taiwan.
It's a good thing that there is absolutely nothing could disrupt a supply from Taiwan. Absolutely no sort of geopolitical instability with a US political rival there that could happen with that place!
Anyway, we're supposed to be fixing that, there was a law passed back in 2022, called the CHIPS & Science Act, with incentives for building chip fab in the US, causing a bunch of new plants built by *checks note* Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Wait), GlobalFoundries, owned by Mubadala Investment Company, aka, the United Arab Emirates, and Intel, which...actually is an American company, so hey. One out of three ain't bad.
And of course there are some other chip fabs already in the US, like Samsung. (I mean, at least that's _South Korea_, and it is very implausible we could end up in any sort of real disagreement with them. *checks earpiece* Wait, their president's been arrested? Is that about the relationship with us? Or we did overthrow him? *pause* No to both?! That isn't anything to do with us at all?! Wow, that's...unexpected. Carry on then.)
The US is actually incredibly bad at actually doing things to secure things of strategic importance. Semiconductors is an industry we've literally tried to pass laws to fix this in, and it's resulted in bunch of foreign-owned plants in the US, and I don't really feel like that's a logical solution, unless we're prepared to suddenly start nationalizing industries when they decide to shut down operations.
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It would be nearly impossible for anyone to make the case for tech H1B _at all_, because it is an extraordinarily stupid policy to have. It is deliberately creating both an underclass of less powerful employees who are competing for American jobs, which is a thing that is bad for literally everyone except wealthy business owners.
And the only real possible justification is to argue we need it, but you can't use the 'We need immigrants to pick our food' nonsense that usually is done for other immigrants. You have to use, uh, 'They are smarter than Americans', which absolutely no one is going to vote for.
The problem is, Republicans now have to do that justification.
It also would have been hard for Democrats to do it, although maybe they could have threaded the needle by yammering about 'opportunity' and stuff. Republicans cannot do that.
I think a lot of people are subconsciously operating on the idea 'MAGA oppose it, and for xenophobic and often racist reasons, ergo it must be good', but...no. It's not.
To put it another way, when Elon Musk went crazy in the early days of Twitter and tried to get people to sign 'I will work myself to death to pay off the debt Musk incurred by borrowing to buy this company' crazy and probably illegal oaths, and a huge chuck of his workforce quit...the only people left were the H1B visa holders.
Without H1B visa, it is entirely possible that Twitter would have _literally failed_. Not as a company, but as a piece of software. Because no one who had a choice wanted to work there anymore. (And a reminder they didn't quit for political reasons, at that exact moment he was pretending to be apolitical and buying Twitter because 'They're lying about bots' or something. The whole Trumpism thing started months later.)
I personally think if you make your place of work so horrific that half the workforce walks out the door, it isn't a great thing if the only reason the rest of it is staying in place is they will be _deported_ if they quit.
On “Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty”
Let me tl;dr it for you:
Israel and the pre-Israel militias that became Israel's military killed 15,000 Arabs and displaced 750,000 Arabs in a single year, forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense.
Surrounding Arab nations, in response to this, had some violent riots that killed ~500 Jews over a decade or so, and had legal changes and threats of violence that resulted in 900,000 Jews eventually leaving them over four or five decades, usually forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense
You may notice the first was _entirely_ violence, very rapid violence, resulting in a lot of deaths, whereas the second was some small amount of violence, a implied terroristic threat of more violence in the future, and mostly just a bunch of laws and restrictions that made it very clear Jews were unwelcome, or were legally required to leave.
Again, the second is _still_ ethnic cleansing. It's reprehensible. No one should have their government say 'People like you are not allowed to live in this country, you have to move, and we're keeping your house', or have the worry of 'People occasionally get very angry at people like us and kill a dozen', especially when its clear the government doesn't _particularity_ mind that, even if it's not official government action.
But pretending they are morally equivalent is nonsense.
"
There are some part of the laws (There's actually multiple laws), like foreign aid, that can be waived, and in fact have been waived for other countries. They have not been waived for Israel, so it's actually still illegal.
There are parts that cannot be waived, and those have to do with supplying weapons.
And Israel has not 'officially' tested nukes in the sense that they have not admitted it and the US State Department has very pointedly refused to say anything about it. There is no actual doubt they were behind the nuclear explosions off the coast of South Africa, and there were actually three explosions.
BTW, working with and having a military alliance with South Africa in 1979 is, um, rather deplorable behavior, South Africa was already a become a pariah nation by that point for Apartheid, including a complete arms embargo by the UN in 1977, including nuclear material, but is something Israel indeed did.
The funniest document to come out of all that is this:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/05/23/Peres-letter.pdf
(In case anyone is wondering about South Africa, when it became clear they were going to overthrow Apartheid, they dismantled their nuclear weapons, and signed the NPT. They're fine now under the law.)
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/23/2024”
Being able to change jobs is nothing. That requires you having already located a job and already been hired by them.
The leverage is from the threat of getting let go. You stop having a job, you have 60 days to find another. Which is, of course, harder for people on a H-1B visas than other people, processing itself can take a month or longer, and they have to find a company that not only will do the paperwork but pay the application fee.
60-days is actually pretty damn short to find a job regardless.
On “Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty”
Their ultimate goal, yes.
If, in some unlikely universe, literally every US president from now on held the same position as they do and commuted the sentence of everyone that was ever put on death row, hypothetically they'd 'get what they wanted' (Well, except for state executions.), but that's just silly. You generally want political changes done via laws and not subject to the whim of the president.
Yeah, but as far as anyone can tell, that's just _Biden's_ belief system. That was the point I was making, that this isn't some 'statement of the anti-death penalty people, who have decided to carve exceptions'.
Incidentally, the belief system was actually stated by Biden, where he said the commutations were 'consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder'.
'Hate-motivated mass murder' is rather vague, but...honestly, a lot of people on death row are 'normal' murderers who just got really unlucky in the court system, with people who committed identical crimes often getting 15 years. It's almost totally random. I'm honestly not sure if there's anyone on the list of 37 that would be borderline.
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The NPT forbids selling any nuclear tech to any country that has not signed. Taha is not what is relevant.
The US law called the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act bars selling weapons to nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT.
- https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-nuclear-weapons/
There is no possible waiver and the sanctions are _ridiculously high_ under US law, if you detonate a nuclear device (after 1977) without having signed the NPT.
Israel detonated a nuclear device September 22, 1979. Everyone knows it. The US basically admits it. But...refuses to actually admit it. The Department of Energy (You know, the nuclear people) apparently have rules where employees and contractors cannot mention this fact, they treat it as somehow classified.
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...what are you talking about? The first settlement was basically _immediately_ after Israel controlled the territory. It was like six months or something, I can't be bothered to look it up.
It...hasn't, actually. Israel withdrawing from Gaza resulted in a massive dip in violence, or at least death, as Hamas was no longer able to pull off suicide bombings because _they couldn't reach Israelis_, and had to resort to extremely inefficient rocket attacks, and had to team up with Iran (Who they hadn't worked with before) to even manage those!
And this was with Israel literally handing an entire territory over to Hamas, a thing that would not happened had they withdrawn starting _a decade earlier_.
It really is amazing to watch the mental filter you have on, where violence _by the IDF_ against Palestinians in Palestine, doesn't count as organized violence, presumably because it's by the government, whereas violence by Hamas against Israelis in Israeli is organized violence...despite them 'winning elections' on that.
Fun fact: Neither of them are the government of the territory or people they are harming. Both of them, however, are 'governments'. So it's somewhat hard to see the difference.
And to be clear, Israel is neither legally the government of the Gaza String _or_ the West Bank. The West Bank has a government called the Palestinian Authority, created by a joint agreement between the PLO and Israel. (We can argue whether they or Hamas are the government of Gaza, if Hamas 'officially' won a civil war and took part of the country...but it's not Israel either way.) Israel, as an occupying power, only allows the PA partial civil control over part of its own territory, and illegally took back a lot of control in 2005. (Instead of, as I said, doing a withdrawal process that was supposed to end in 1999.)
To be even more clear, the PA has mostly not objected to the actions of Israel because they are incredibly corrupt and essentially bribed by the US and other countries not to object, and they have failed to hold elections for almost two decades at this point so the Palestinians can replace them.
But the PA's inaction can't actually make the actions of Israel legal.
"
...over the thing that their country agreed to do without any conditions, and then did not do?
Yes. Only they have agency over that.
...only Hamas has agency, apparently.
You know, there was a perfectly functional way to stop suicide bombing that worked incredibly well from 2005 onward. It was called a) building an actual border wall, and b) not having Israelis on the wrong side of the wall.
This, of course, is incredibly hard to do with settlements, although Israel eventually did it, mostly by barring Palestinians from large sections of the West Bank.
It would have been easier to just _withdrawal_ like they were supposed to, on the timetable they had agreed to.
Oh, let me guess 'Hamas would have just started doing rockets earlier'. Well, no, they wouldn't have, because they were not, in fact, part of the government then. In fact, that wouldn't have been impossible had Israel not deliberately _handed Gaza over to Hamas_.
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The aftermath of 'Israel's war' _was_ ethnic cleansing. There is literally no way other to describe 'Removing 750,000 from an area based on their ethnicity so there are less people of that ethnicity living there relative to other people'. It is basically the _definition_ of ethnic cleaning.
Arab states kicking out their Jews was always ethnic cleansing.
And not to defend those Arab countries too much, but they tended to do it somewhat slower and saner and via some sort of legal process and didn't kill 15,000 people while doing it, unlike Israel. The casualties, as far as I can tell, are in the hundreds, despite Arab countries expelling ~900,000 Jews vs. Israel and Jewish paramilitaries expelling ~750,000 Arabs. I want to be clear, it's still ethnic cleansing, but it is at least a good deal less bloody.
Granted, the number widely varies depending on what you count. How far in the past are we counting? Are we counting things that are very obviously due to European colonialism, including actual Na.zis controlling the country, and not any sort of 'Arab' decision?
For an actual example of deaths that would clearly count as part of this, there was about 80 Jews killed in a riot in Yemen in 1947, a riot explicitly about Israel. 14 killed in an anti-Jewish riot in Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1945. There are a half dozen other events like that in a few different places, 75 dead in Syria, but it's like...countable. A few individual events, riots, where some of number of Jews died. I don't know the full amount, there probably were a bunch of small groups we don't know about, but if we assume the _biggest_ are the ones people talk about, and we're throwing around numbers like 80 and 75 and 14 as the largest for some countries, it's hard to see how it could be more than a thousand, and I think about half that is a more reasonable guess.
That ethnic cleansing did not end up with 15,000 people dead, in a single year, which is what Israeli's ethnic cleansing did.
Again, not defending Arab's countries, just pointing out how _insanely violent_ the Nakba was, and how you keep downplaying it and doing whataboutism of Arab countries did it too!'. Just wanted to point out Israel 'escorted people at gunpoint and killed a lot of them in a very short period of time', whereas a lot of the Arab ethnic cleansing was 'a few violent riots and some economic oppression and Jews, over a period of decades, ended up on flights leaving the country, either because they were required by law or they could just read the writing on the wall'. Not all ethnic cleansing is identical.
Or to put it another way: Israel and a bunch of Arab countries all committed ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Israel, and the armed militias that existed before Israel and were turned into its military, also committed a f*ckton of war crimes while doing that ethnic cleansing.
"
While the countries might not have 'formal' borders, they do in fact have clearly defined areas areas that they are supposed to control, with Israel slowly withdrawing from, in five years, aka, by May 1999, under the Oslo Accords and related accords, treaties that Israel signed.
They have not done that, and in fact exist in areas they are not supposed to exist.
And no, this is not the fault of Palestinians. We can argue why negotiations stalled near the end of that five year period, whose fault that was, but that gave Israel no right to stall with their withdrawal, the withdrawal was not dependent on those negotiations.
Yet they did stop them withdrawal, and in fact later reversed some of them, due to political opposition within _Israel_ for the treaties _they had signed_. (Including a far-right Israeli assassinating their own prime minister for working on the Accords.)
"
We've passed laws saying we won't sell weapons to countries that did not sign and yet developed nuclear weapons.
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We have literally dozens of reasons to not supply arms to a country besides 'genocide'.
For example, if they're doing ethnic cleanings.
Or have developed nuclear weapons without signing on to the non-profliferation treaty.
"
It's not, you can actually tell by the name 'anti-death penalty' as to what their political position is. They are against _having_ the death penalty as punishment. At all. Against it existing as a punishment for crime.
What Biden does or does not do is a good reason to criticize Biden, I guess. Or his advisors, sure. Not 'anti-death penalty folks', which Biden doesn't really claim to be...or maybe he does, and if he does, well, he's a hypocrite, but that's just him.
Where I think you have been confused is that the anti-death penalty people have minorly criticized him for falling slightly short, while praising him for practically doing like 95% of the best he could do.(1) You might not know this because the anti-death penalty organizations get absolutely no airtime.
They aren't going to run some sort of massive campaign to attack him for not going all the way.
You know that's normally how politics works, right? If a politician hand someone a political win of 95%, they don't attack him. They might not award him any awards, or maybe they will, but they're not going to attack him. (In addition to the question of 'What the hell is the point of attacking Biden anyway?')
1) A reminder, although I just said it: The goal of the anti-death penalty people is not 'a politician sometimes commutes the sentence of everyone on death row'. The goal is 'Capital punishment literally no longer exists as a punishment on the books' and maybe even 'is barred for states by a law at the Federal level'. That's not something the president can do, though, that requires either a supreme court decision (unlikely) or legislature.
"
Oh, and I guess I should point the difference between 'getting the thing you can practically get' vs 'getting what you want'.
There are plenty of times pro-life organizations will support a bill with rape or incest exemptions despite them not approving them. Likewise, it would be fine for anti-death-penalty organizations to support a bill that massively reduces and reforms the death penalty, but does not end it.
If you completely oppose X, and a bill is sitting there that _mostly_ stops X but sometimes allows it, it is entirely reasonable to say 'I do not like these exceptions, but it is better than nothing.'
The problem arises when they, or politicians who claim to follow their philosophy, are not willing to state the actual conclusion and instead fall short and cave and make exceptions because they think the conclusion would be unpopular.
If you are claiming that something is murdering kids, but women who have very bad crimes happen to them to put them in that position should be _allowed_ to murder kids, you, uh, are really obviously a hypocrite and a lair...or a complete sociopath. But probably just a liar who does not actually believe it is murder, even if you have manage to convince yourself that you do believe it.
Likewise, if you are claiming the death penalty is immoral, that the power of the state should not be allowed to end anyone's life, that it is immoral to purposefully kill someone...except, like, that one dude over there who did the most bad things, he's fine to kill...you're a liar or an idiot.
This is admittedly somewhat trickery WRT a lot of death penalty opposition, which, as you can tell by this very page, is often grounded in more practical complaints, not morality. It would be, I guess, possible to say 'The death penalty is apply inconsistently and erratically and in a racist and classist manner and costs a lot and doesn't really do much, but this _particular_ guy really did deserve it' or even a most consistent 'the death penalty should only be for terrorism'...but no one's actually arguing that. Biden might have randomly thought that, and acted on it, but, like, we're not Biden.
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No he didn't, for a very simple reason: Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not have to reflectively defend everything their leadership says.
What we have an example here is of what one guy believes. That guy was elected president, so it's entirely reasonable to say 'The blame for this (Whatever that would be) is on Democrats', but it's not some sort of reasoned implementation of Democratic policy...there are plenty of Democrats and people on the actual left asserting everyone's sentence should be commuted, some people with 'most of them should be commuted, but it's fine to leave some there' (Aka, what Biden did), and others who basically don't have an opinion and...honestly, I'm not really seeing any 'No one's sentence should be commuted', there's not a huge pro-death penalty side over here, but they could exist.
But this isn't policy. This is something Biden chose to do, by himself. No one else has to defend it, because it's not a policy position. People with a policy position of 'The death penalty should be abolished' have no problem continuing to hold that position, they have not been revealed to be hypocrites or anything.
And even _that_ wouldn't be hypocrisy unless this commutation was, like, their policy being implemented. Like if Biden stepped up and said 'I have commuted the sentence of these people and left the others on death row following the guidelines of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who said not to commute the sentence of those last three guys because they're Really Bad and deserve killing.'. That would be stupid hypocrisy and undermine any argument they had.(1)
You know, in exactly the same way that a party that wants to outlaw something, something they call murder, but clearly do not think of as murder, because they're willing to let some people do it. That is them having to build a policy, and they put loopholes in it allow some murder. It is perfectly fine to call that out as what it is: They do not actually believe the things they are saying.
1) That organization make a practical argument against the death penalty, not moral, but it would still undermine them if their position is 'the death penalty is done right ~5% of the time'. That weakens the abolition side quite a lot and just argues for reform.
You keep doing these things that is just vaguely 'People had this response to one thing, and people had an entirely different response to something else'.
Firstly, perhaps most obviously, people feel different about the power of the state doing something in their own name vs. something just happening. Which is something a lot of people pretend desperately to never understand, notice how opposition to arming Israel is met with 'You don't oppose Hamas and they're as bad', and everyone just calmly says 'We probably shouldn't arm Hamas either!' There is a difference between something I, or someone claiming to represent me and the system I supposedly have a voice in and a level of control doing something, and just...some dude doing something.
Or to put it in a way conservatives should understand: There is a different between the government doing something and private citizens doing something.
But secondly, there's absolutely no evidence those are the same people. Some people voiced opinions that Nassar getting killed was a good thing. Those people made noise, and you heard them. And some people voice opinions (In a more formal and louder way, cause this is a real political position) that the death penalty is bad, and you hear them, in fact, they are part of a political debate.
Those are probably not the same people. Some of them might even be part of the same 'group' of people, like the Democrats, but that doesn't make them the actual same people.
"
It's also very interesting the crazy spectrum that exists there. Anthony Battle raped one person and murdered two.
Now, this is, uh, very very bad, but I promise you, people do not _normally_ get the death penalty for that. A lot of people do not even get 'prison without the chance of parole' for that!
He notable was sentenced to death just for the prison guard murder, in 1997, after already being in prison. This is...kind of crazy, honestly. There are people who have killed prison guards out on the street 27 years later, and he was on death row.
And, look, maybe people feel those crimes deserve it, but if they do, the system is just completely broken in the other direction, because the vast vast vast majority of people convicted for that level of stuff are not sentenced to death.
The death penalty makes absolutely no sense when it is so erratically applied. We just pick one random guy...often, it must be pointed out, a very poor one who cannot afford a lawyer, often is a minority, and just...sentence that guy as hard as humanly possible, and then spend decades trying to figure out how to actually do the sentence.
Hey, do people know that between the start of the modern Federal death penalty in 1998 and it being paused in 2021, almost half of all Federal death sentences came from Missouri, Texas, and Virginia? And 10 of the actual 16 executed. Those states, put together, have only 15% of the US population. And...both Texas and Missouri are moderately high in violent crimes, 12th and 8th respectively per 100,000, but that's not that high, and Virginia is way down at 42th. That feels...weird, doesn't it? This is the Federal death penalty, I won't say it should be identical across the states, but should it be that different? (Is the reason that Virginia is on that list is that Washington is right there?)
Meanwhile other people are getting 5-10 years for a murder, and even the absolute worst murdery ones are getting life without parole.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
I have no idea why pointing out that Na.zis were elected legitimately is relevant to this discussion.
Yeah, they often are.
But, hey, good job blaming immigrants, you'll fit right in. Not with Germany in general, there was a huge outrage when the AfD was found to be trying to plan to deport a bunch of these refugees and other no-sufficiently-German people, but you really just need a time machine to solve that problem. Just set it far enough back.
What has actually happened in Germany is that the AfD managed to make a very small backlash to the refugee situation, but revelations of just how Na.zi-ish the AfD has resulted in a backlash against them and a defeat at the polls.
What is going to probably happen is that the major parties are going to moderate a bit on just how many refugees they accept and try to get other countries to accept more instead.
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No, I'm pointing out that you find 'Trump is Hitler' more absurd than 'These people are Na.zis', so you keep rewriting what people say into 'Trump is Hitler'.
No one is Hitler. No one will ever be Hitler except Hitler. People cannot be other people, and there will always be some way comparisons between two people do not work.
Na.zism is, however, an _ideology_, and like all political ideologies is has various implementations, some of which _currently exist in the world_ and people follow. These people include the AfD, and they include Elon Musk, and they include a lot of other people in rather prominent positions on the right. (We _already had_ this discussion about Sebastian Gorka, who is, again, wearing fake medals meant to honor Na.zi Hungarian collaborators issued by 'Historical Vitézi
Rend', a Neo-Na.zi group!)
This is why you keep rewriting references, so you do not have to recognize the _actual Na.zis_ running around. You can pretend everyone is just making crazy over-the-top claims that someone is actually Hitler.
Even when we're not even talking about Trump! We were talking about Elon Musk, an 'advisor' to the President-Elect, openly supporting a neo-Na.zi political party. Do you have anything _actually_ to say about that? Does that not seem like a problem?
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...what an incredibly weird comment. It's impossible for you to honestly mean it, as you have spent weeks harping about how a comparison between Trump and Hitler is absurd, and yet there's not any other way to take it.
And I will, again, point you that you are the first to mention Hitler, a thing to do to try to make arguments into Reductio ad Hitlerum. Saul, very correctly, merely pointed out that AfG was a hairbreath from the Na.zi party...about as legally close as parties are allowed in Germany, in fact, and is under investigation by Germany for being an extremist group, and could actually be barred from participating in elections.
Hell, AfG was kicked out of Identity and Democracy, which is a European-level far-right political 'party' (Well, group of national parties, that team up together for EU Parliment elections), which _they themselves_ had helped found back in 2019, because they attended an extremist meeting in 2023 with 'Identitarians' (Aka, the pan-Euporean version of neo-Na.zis), and the Identity and Democracy group is trying to be very, very clear that they are not Na.zis.
Now, that's Germany. Here in the US, we don't stop Na.zis, at least not native born ones (We did revoke some naturalized citizenships from Germanys during WWII and arrest those guys.) from running for office. (The only party we've done that with is the Communist Party.) So I'm sure some people will have a problem with Germany's actions there, or possibly barring a political party from running for office (Unless they are filthy communists) but that doesn't really change their determination that 'Hey, these people and group ideology are a very very close to Na.zis'. Like, we can assume that Germany can identify Na.zis, right? As can the rest of Europe?
On “From The Wall Street Journal: How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge”
Hey, hey, _both_ parties are a gerontocracy clinging to power so tightly, and at the expense of any other aim, that they ran a septuagenarian in serious cognitive decline for president, twice.
One is _also_ a proto-fascist cult of personality that’s currently being led from behind the scenes by the son of a South African emerald dealer. Two things can be true at once.
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