Besides what Dark Matter pointed out, Israel has withdrawn from South Lebanon.
Yes, after 20 years of not doing that.
The Sheba Farms are in the Golan Heights, which was part of Syria before the Six Day War.
Would you like to explain how Israel gets to control part of Syria?
Are we just ignoring the fact that Israel shouldn't be there _regardless_ of what country it is, because it sure as hell isn't Israel.
Oh, but Israel has, in fact, annexed it illegally.
Well, Israel didn’t really withdraw because it maintains a hard land border with Gaza rather than letting Gazans come and go as they please.
Literally no one asserts that. Israel can control their own borders, although I remind them they have to control their own borders on _their_ side and not the _other_ side, and a military shooting across international borders is generally considered an act of war.
The reason that people assert that Israel did not withdraw because they fully controlled Gaza's other borders. You know, the ones that weren't with Israel.
If we want to pretend that Gaza is a sovereign country, you realize that Israel instantly and immediately committed an act of war by doing that, right? Blockading a country's ocean traffic is an act of war. Just, straight up an act of war.
Those are your two choices: Gaza is a country that Israel started a deliberate war with immediately after it existed, or it was not a sovereign country and was always under Israeli occupation.
You know there's a joke about half the countries in the world have been at wart with England?
Anyone want to make a guess as to how many countries Israel has occupied for over a decade?
Four. All of which they have built settlements in and illegally annexed portions of.
The only one it's really given up completely is Egypt's Sinai, which they eventually gave back. That was only only 15 years occupation! It did try to to illegal build settlements in the Sinai, but for some reason just gave up. I suspect Israelregretted that.
Of course, it is entirely possible that what Israel is saying about Sheeba Farms is true, that the Sheeba Farms things is just a pretext by Hezbollah. Complaints about it being part of Lebanon do seem a little late in the process of withdrawal.
Of course, one questions _why_ exactly, Israel is so determine to own this 8.2 square miles of Syria that is almost entirely sheep farms and does not border Israel that they are unwilling to just say 'Here you go, Hezballoh. Now what? That was your issue, right? That's what you said you were fighting over? Well, now what?'
Hey LeeEqg, why does Israel think it has a right to Shebaa Farms?
And the usual justification of 'Israel gets to keep it because they seized it in the Six-Day War' (which is not how internationl law works) doesn't even work here, because _Lebanon_ wasn't part of that war.
Do you want to know Israel's position on this?
"Israel says the land was Syrian when it was captured during the Six-Day War, and the dispute is being used by Hezbollah to continue its attacks on Israel."
That is their actual statement, and I urge people to read that sentence a few times just to see how absurd it is.
To clarify the history of the area and what Israel is talking about: Syria used to administer it, but Lebanon sorta felt they had a claim to it. And Syria agreed! Those two countries discussed that in the 50s/60s and decided that Lebanon _should_ own it, and were going to transfer it over, but before they could redraw the borders, the Six-Day War happened.
So, in a way, Israel can make a legal claim that they have stolen the territory (Yes, they have outright annexed it, not just occupied it) from Syria, not Lebanon. In another way, that's obviously stupid, because Israel has no right to annex _Syria_, either.
But a sane person would be asking, at that moment, "Wait, 'the dispute is being used'...so Israel can just call their bluff, give this incredibly unimportant and trivial territory to Lebanon, and...Hezbollah would end up with no excuse to keep fighting?"
But that isn't how Israel thinks, because Israel never gives up stolen territory, even when it, very very obviously, is not theirs. It's why it took a UN resolution and 24 years for them to get out of the rest of Lebanon, and why they are standing there arguing that reslution doesn't say they have to give back a completely unimportant section of land that cannot possibly theirs...because, they argue, they have actually stolen it from Syria, not from Lebanon!
This is territory that, again, Israel has no claim to whatsoever. This isn't even a strategic military location, it is, rather obviously, between Syria and Lebanon, and doesn't touch Israel...in fact, that part of Syria is the Golan Heights and occupied by Israel! If someone in Lebanon wants to attack Israel they'd do it across their shared border instead of firing through Syria!
'Hezbollah no longer has any legitimate grievance with Israel.'
Incorrect. Israel hasn't left the territory. Shebaa Farms is recognized internationally as part of Lebanon, and Israel is still there. Israel justifies this weirdly under the logic that that area is actually part of Syria, which last I checked wasn't part of Israel either. (Syria, weirdly, agrees with Lebanon, that the area is Lebanon.)
It's literally the stated issue that Hezbollah has with Israel, and wow is it weird how we can have huge detailed discussions about how an entity is 'evil Jew-hating' without once actually mentioning their _stated_ problem with Israel? The word 'Shebaa' does not even appear on this entire page before right now. I get not believing stated motives, but it sure is odd how the actual stated problem is not even _known_ to most people discussing things? It's almost as if the discussion is almost irrevocably tilted toward Israel in some weird way.
In fact, people don't actually seem to understand how bad Israel is at actually leaving anywhere. They like to claim they have left, but repeatedly fail to actually fully do so. They will just...keep border territories under completely nonsense justification or claim they need a 'buffer'. (Which, as I remind people every time, no country has a right to build a buffer zone _inside another country_, a thing which should be obvious but somehow isn't.)
Please note that these buffers also, very quickly, get annexed by Israel and Israel rapidly moves to needing a buffer for _those_ areas.
An actual sane country 'under attack form all sides' like Israel claims to be would withdraw to its actual borders and then build a couple of miles of buffer _inside_ those borders, not constantly run around annexing part of Syria and Lebanon and Palestine for 'security'.
The Lebanese government is so weak it doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force.
This is because it has had other countries destabilize it for 70+ years, INCLUDING ISRAEL. Both Israel itself, and the fact Israel drove a hell of a lot of Palestine refugees into Lebanon in the Nakba.
Who did all that, it must be pointed out, BEFORE IRAN. Hezbollah was created (again, without Iran support, that came a few years later) to _oppose Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon_, created to fill that vacuum after the PLO left.
If Israel hadn't been there, Hezbollah never would have existed in the first place for Iran to take over. In fact, Lebanon was pretty pissed at refugee Palestinians and the PLO at that point! (They never even wanted them there to start with. They just weren't willing to shoot them as they were forced over the border.)
If Israel had left, the entire situation was over!
They did not leave.
In fact, Israel shouldn't have even been there to start with. Because, as I mentioned, they screwed around in a civil war and picked some absolutely horrible 'allies' to committed atrocities that Israel has at least an indirect level of culpability in. Hell, they gave our weapons to those people! Just straight up fanatic murderers. (But they were Christian fanatics who murdered Muslims, so that barely counts.)
Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon almost 25 years ago.
A reminder: A good chunk of Israel's problems in Lebanon are Israel's problem, mostly because Israel feels free to invade south Lebanon whenever it wants.
They also choose to ally, in the civil war that they should not have been involved in, with 'Lebanese Christian Militia', a group that, unequivalently, committed a massacre of civilians, while the IDF, uh, stoppped those civilians from leaving the massacre zone. This is actually what forced Ariel Sharon to resign.
That withdrawal 25 years ago, in 2000? It was ordered by the UN in 1978. Which is when the PLO left. Meanwhile, Israel just continued to be there, long after the PLO had left.
It could have just left in 1978. Instead, it tried to install its own Lebanese government and, quite rightly, caused a lot of resentment. Both of Israel and the US.
Which allowed the creation of Hezbollah, in 1982, by Lebanese clerics. (Later hijacked by Iran.) It also resulted in a lot of attacks on American embassies and bases by various groups.
All of that, literally all of that, could have been averted by Israel just leaving Lebanon after the PLO was gone, which was the supposed reason they were there.
But Israel thinks it can put 'buffer zones' inside of _other countries_, instead of, you know, how it actually works: You put buffers at the border inside _your own_ country. You don't get to steal, in this specific example, 10% of Lebanon!
How many of your friends cheered the act of resistance when Hamas killed Jewish babies and children on October 7th or took children as hostages?
Baby. There was exactly one Jewish baby killed Oct 7th. Her name was Mila Cohen. She was shot while her mother was holding her, probably by accident while attempting to kill her mother.
For my non-sarcastic repose to this: I am someone who has pointed out that political violence (At least at the 'destruction of property' level, or even the 'punching na.zis' level, but not killing) is occasionally justified, so I have two points to make here:
a) Using violence against the leader of an authoritarian movement is just going to play exactly into the tropes they want to play into, and in fact they _welcome_ attempted violence. Indeed, the only reason their Jan 6th coup didn't work is antifa _didn't_ show up so Trump had no excuse to declare martial law...that entire thing was supposed to descend into chaos and fighting on the streets, and instead it was just a bunch of right-wing dumbasses yelling, shoving, and trampling police and then running around like idiots hunting for Congresspeople. (We are incredibly lucky the plans for all that got leaked because the right has no actual op-sec.)
All assassinating Trump is going to accomplish is get JD Vance elected, and the martyrdom of Trump would solve a _lot_ of the problems of the actual monsters on the right. Because Trump is, frankly, an idiot who doesn't care about anything, but they could easily take the movement where they want it to go.
b) This person is a noodle-brain conspiracy theorist and even if there was some possible reason to justify violence against Trump, he certainly did not have that as a motive. Which is always the motive of the _first_ people who resort to violence. Their thresholds are stupider and nonsense and often they just want violence as the end in itself.
I mean, this is what happens after decades of Democrats promoting 'second amendment remedies' as required to stop authoritarianism.
Hold on, I'm being informed that was Republicans, and by 'authoritarianism' they meant 'the democratically-elected government deciding that you have to get a permit to be a hairdresser and can't gaze your cattle on public lands without paying for it' and not 'someone who attempted to subvert the democratic process via armed militias and might get put back into power and is very blatantly and clearly an authoritarian'.
Honestly, looking at BLS data from 2021, it didn't look like much has changed at all since 2021, which is, from what I understand, when this started.
Unemployment has gone down a little, but that's just how it's worked everywhere. And the population doesn't appear to have much changed... If you had shown me the data without telling me what was happening, I would have just assumed it was normal population growth.
... And then I stopped looking at 2021-2024, and looked at 2014-2024.
Seriously, I urge everyone to do that, you will see a town that really was slowly losing its labor force, until it suddenly wasn't. It dropped from 66,000 to around 63,000. It actually gets down the 61,000 but a chunk of that is covid, which complicates all this, but it was clearly dropping rapidly even before that. And then the refugees came in, and bumped it back up by a couple of thousand.
And unlike what people might expect, unemployment went down, not up, probably because these were a lot of young people.
I think people might be exaggerating the decline that the town was in before all this, which is easy to exaggerate because of covid, but, the future didn't look good for this place, long term. And now it does. Mostly because it now looks like normal population growth that you would expect from a town, and not slow decline.
Do you really think jokes about politicians and couches are equivalent to claiming that a minority is eating pets?
Can we actually just look at the effects of those two lies to figure out if there is a distinction?
There are armed vigilante hate groups that are hard to call anything but Na.zis, even if they call themselves Proud Boys, that have descended on Springfield Ohio, looking for Haitian refugees that have eaten cats.
Absolutely nothing has happened to JD Vance. The lie wasn't even something that would turn up the rhetoric, it wasn't the sort of lie that would cause violence to start with.
Moreover, in a hypothetical where the lies were the same... Are the powerful not in a much better position to refute lies then the powerless? JD Vance has a national platform, anytime he wants one. Haitian refugees don't.
Also, making up lies about a group of people is fundamentally different than making up lies about one person. Lies about entire groups of people, especially lies about the 'bad behavior' of groups of people, have been responsible for some of the worst behavior of human beings in human history. Lies about individuals generally only impact individuals.
This debate is how literally every debate with Donald Trump should have gone, because Donald Trump is a giant gift to the debating trick of 'answer the question you want instead of the one you were asked'.
Because with Trump, you not only can answer the question you want, you can make him answer the question that he now wants (aka, is psychologically incapable of refusing) to answer, instead of the one that he should be answering.
For example, as someone who plans to vote for Harris (obviously), I do think it is a valid point that she is refusing to answer the question of why the administration that she is part of hasn't done the things she said she will do.
For the record, I think there are a couple of good answers for that, I'm not really attacking her on that point, but she has managed to not have to answer that question, which is good because those answers would bog down her campaign and not work for everyone.
So she is just ignored it, and that's, I guess, how politics and the media works now. Well, I've known that because that's how Trump has always functioned, but I'm glad that the Democrats have finally realized they don't really have to address anything ever... I mean, I guess I'm not glad about that, actually, but it's better than Democrats trying to address it, thus losing, and someone who I think we all need to admit at this point is an outright fascist getting into office.
It is not the Democrats fault that the media has been utterly destroyed and turned into gibberish, so much so that candidates can get away with not ever addressing things that they should be addressing.
And it has been a really, really long time that I thought a Democrat has run a good campaign, one that actually understands things. Whoever is running hers is astonishing.
It was the show, and Sam wasn't even Captain America at the time, and never had publicly been Captain America. Steve had chosen him, but he decided not to take the position and turned the shield in.
In fact, I'm not entirely certain why he wasn't in jail at the moment... He'd been a fugitive for two years due to the events of Civil War before ceasing to exist for five. I assume there was some sort of off-screen pardon or something
Are you serious? You think this is a serious point, you think these are important progressive positions that she backed off on?
For one thing, you do realize that the wall thing is the wrong way, right? She possibly accepted the Republican position as a compromise, said she would sign that specific bill because it had a bunch of other stuff in it, despite it having something she didn't like. That's not a position change, and it wouldn't be to the center if it was. That's expressing support for a compromise bill.
Likewise, she has not expressed support for reparations for slavery, in fact there is no support for reparations for slavery in Congress or in the government at all. What there is is a bill that keeps getting reintroduced to create a _commission_ to look into long-term effects of slavery and to make recommendations that Congress could choose to enact into law if it wanted to. Harris's views on this have not changed, the claims that they have changed are based on pretending that her support for that bill to create a commission were support for any particular reparations, which is obviously nonsense. She does not and never had supported any particular reparations, she has and still does support a commission to look into the idea.
Harris still supports electric vehicles as much as she did before. I have no idea what anyone is talking about with a policy change. Sometimes specific bills have failed and people move on to other bills and ways to do things. That does not mean a policy change.
It's the same with these supposed federal jobs guarantee... Harris never supported a federal jobs guarantee as a concept, she just supported a bill that had it in it. The fact she isn't pushing for something that was in a bill she supported once doesn't mean it's a flip flop. You can't just pick random policy positions from bills that people vote on and then claim the fact that they aren't trying to do it years later as a flip-flop, it's just an abandonment of a specific way of doing something.
The mandatory gun buyback thing is actual nonsense, like it's actually incoherent to claim that that is a policy of hers to start with, when that is merely a trivial point in an actual policy. The actual policy is to ban assault weapons, and then she added that they shouldn't be taken away from people who currently have them without compensation. I'm not really certain the people even understand the very basics of this, they are approaching it from such a fundamentally stupid angle that it's hard to discuss it. How is it a conservative position that, if their guns are taking away, people shouldn't be compensated for it? Like, how is that moving to the center to say that? Honestly, I think people getting paid for the weapons they have is actually a conservative position and not paying them would be the liberal one, right? Or does this even matter? This being on the list is just drooling nonsense, in fact everyone who has ever asked her about this in the media is a complete imbecile, I cannot stress that enough.
As far as I can tell, she has not changed her position on 'banning assault weapons'. Period, end of story.
Anyone claiming she has changed positions on these things is kind of an idiot or deliberately misinterpreting things.
Things Harris actually has changed her position on: fracking, border crossing, Medicare for all
The only one of those that got changed for electoral reasons is the border crossing one, mostly because the Republicans are very good at scaremongering about the border.
The fracking thing got changed because of all the money and because Democrats will sell out almost as easily as Republicans. Same with the Medicare for all things, although technically speaking Democrats already sold out like five years ago on that.
I don't know, is being an adult male a preexisting condition?
Here are, literally, the requirements for Medicaid in Georgia:
You think you are pregnant.
You are a child or teenager.
You are age 65 or older.
You are legally blind.
You have a disability.
You need nursing home care.
These are, to be clear, the _current_ requirements for Medicaid. Right now, in 2024.
Note those _also_ require absurdly low income.
It is amazing how many Americans, especially those on the right, are flatly delusional about what Medicaid covered without the expansion.
I mean, I feel like you're joking, but this is actually how a lot of urban police departments operate, often in incredibly racist ways.
Anyone want to look back up the stats for Ferguson and what was happening there? In the end, the DOJ actually found the Ferguson city council relied on fines and other charges generated by the police for funding municipal services. Like, they literally couldn't operate without the level of fines they were giving out, so had absolutely no incentive to reduce crime.
I just find it funny that no one ever seems to consider doing the same for the crimes that white people commit. Which are actually much worse than in Ferguson, which had fines for such insane things as 'giving the nickname Mike instead of Michael' and fining people for window tint, along with the always fun 'loitering'. At least 'extremely blatant trespassing in direct violation of a no trespassing sign' is a crime that most people agree should be prosecuted.
If this was purely a monetary thing, the police could just stand there and let the money roll in. But of course it's not purely a monetary thing, it's also a system of control and maintaining the status quo and keeping certain underclasses the underclass and not poking the people who are not the underclass.
The argument that generative AI is not an assistive technology, at all.
Because it does not assist in writing.
It just _does_ writing. The entire thing. From start to end.
Assistive technology enables disabled people to perform tasks, it is not something doing the task _for them_. Having a maid clean your house, while something that is incredibly useful for disabled people, is not an assistive technology.
The problem is that it is often hard to define the actual goals of things being done. Wheelchairs, for example, do not assist with the task of walking...they instead assist with the task of moving from place to place. (Usually shorthanded as 'mobility')
It is easy to think that AI helps with writing, but what it actually helps with is 'Having the end result of a bunch of text'. Which is, of course, not what writing is. Writing is the process of turning ideas into a coherent written whole.
There are ways to assist with that, such as speech-to-text and even grammar tools, and ways that could actually use AI, like something that ready the story well enough to understand it and pointed out problems, aka, a hypothetical real-time editor, which is not something that does exist but could.
But _generative_ AI is not assisting with writing. It is _doing_ the writing itself, and pretty poorly, and there's almost no circumstances where it would do it better than a disabled human anyway.
Also, Jaybird, I'm starting to get the idea that maybe you are not a creative writer?
I don't even call myself a writer, not really, but I do write creatively, in fact, one of the things I write is DC fanfic, and, again, coming up with a premise is trivial.
'Ho do you come up with your idea?' is almost the definition of a question that annoys writers, because coming up with ideas is trivial. It not only is merely the first step of writing, it's barely a step at all.There are literally _people who cannot write_, children who are too young to read and write, that come up with ideas for stories. There are automated writing prompt generators that randomly output characters, verbs, locations, actions, etc, that could come up with your idea!
AI techbros fundamentally misunderstand the actual difficult part of the writing process and think that because they have 'ideas', that is the same as being a writer. (Same with art, incidentally.)
Writing those ideas down is much more difficult, and writing them _meaningfully_ instead of just 'a bunch of stuff happens' is even harder. That is what writing is, not 'having ideas'. AIs can sorta to the first part, via plagerism, but that just creates uniformly bad writing.
And the only reason that generated writing looks passable is that it is absurdly over-the-top deliberate scenery-chewing puns, which is basically _supposed_ to sound like hackney writing. Which is entirely in character for Condiment King, who was designed as a throwback to 1966 Batman.
Try doing it an actual conversation set before that between, let's say, Bruce and Damien Wayne, Bruce having drug Damien to the fair to make him be social, and them running across an adult Dick Grayson who is attending of his own free will to watch this contest...and I came up with that combination in about 60 seconds, it wasn't writing.
I could write it, it honestly isn't very far from the stuff I do write, but it sure as hell would be a lot more work. So let's see the AI result.
Why not ask the AI for 50,000 words of that, and then, hey, you just finished NaNoWriMo ! Congratulations!
Actually, you don't even need the premise! You can just have it write 50,000 words of anything. Or, actually, even easier...I have an epub reader on my computer I can copy things out of, you can just get one of those, and copy text from an existing book.
I might do that this NaNoWriMo.
It's sorta the same way, and people don't know, but I hold the world record in marathon time. It's not official marathon or anything, just the distance, but I used assistive technology, namely, my car, to complete a marathon a few years ago in less than 30 minutes.
Yay us! We're really winning at these self-imposed challenges. Look at all those dumbasses doing things the long way.
Goodwin says social media influencers would regularly climb over a gate plastered with “No Trespassing” signs, set up changing booths to accommodate their many costume swaps, get their “city cars” stuck on the narrow dirt road, and leave bodily waste by the roadside.
It's kinda weird how cops never seem to just wait and arrest these sort of people. Just stand there, out of sight, wait for someone to climb over the fence with a posted No Trespassing right, and immediately arrest them. Or who drive a RV ten feet onto a road clearly marked to not allowed RVs. Park a cop car twenty fee down the road, out of sight, sirens flip on, people get an immediate ticket.
Seems like it would be a bunch of easy arrests. I know there are arguments the system would be overwhelmed, but they have not even _started_. And surely word would spread.
I mean, isn't this the premise of 'tough on crime' the 'broken windows' policing, that if you start enforcing this stuff, everything else gets better? It sure is odd how much the police force is working to try to divert people away, instead of just locking them up and sending a message. Or at minimum towing their cars.
It's almost as if the cops think there's certain kinds of people who should be arrested, and another kind of people who should just be warned, and the actual problem here that the 'people who should just be warned' are an infinite supply of stupidity rotating in, so the warnings never matter.
The weird thing is that they reached a fairly reasonable conclusion while going out of their way to justify it in the dweebiest terms possible.
It's because it's their second draft at a conclusion. Their first on was 'AI is great, use it'. Because, they are, in fact, sponsored by AI companies now after everyone else fled.
The whole 'AI will work as editor' is not only a retroactive justification, but there are not really any AI tools that do that. Grammar and spell checkers have existed for decades, but are not AI at all. Text-to-speech _can_ be machine learning, but literally no one has ever had a problem with writers (Or anyone) using that, and it's generally not considered AI at all, despite machine learning often called AI.
You know, if anyone every ones the almost definitive example of motte and bailey, here it is:
"You need to condemn AI, by which I and everyone else complaining very clearly mean generative AI"
"AI not only includes generative AI, but includes all sorts of machine learning, including things possible helpful for disabled writers. Hence we cannot condemn categorically."
"Do you condemn _generative AI_?"
*crickets*
Or:
NaNoWriMo, original draft: Stabbing people is fine.
Everyone: WTF? No it's not. The community condemns stabbing people. You need to take that back and condemn stabbing people!
NaNoWriMo, second draft:There are two forms of stabbing, consensual and non-consensual. Doctors often stab people, with consent, and it's ableism to deny people the healthcare they need. Thus, we cannot categorically condemn stabbing people.
Everyone: ....so you condemn the non-consensual stabbing subcategory, right? Cause you didn't say that, you didn't say those words, you just sorta hoped we read that into the statement. Which is exceptional weird after you had to sit down and explain the two kinds of stabbing.
NaNoWriMo: ...
Saul, please do a little more research here. NaNoWriMo are a shit organization, and the statement they released at that link is a backtrack of their original position of 'Any AI is fine!'
And they took that position because the only people willing to sponsor them after last year, when all their volunteers quit, is the AI industry, who has never had a problem being child-abuse adjacent.
In case people are unaware, NaNoWriMo _imploded_, very spectacularly, last year. This is because they defended someone who abused children, and then basically had _all_ volunteers leave, en mass, because of their response to everything.
They also lost all their sponsors. Except, of course, the AI techbros who, are always willing to step in and dump huge amounts of cash on cash on things.
And because AI techbros will say and do literally anything to justify heir plagiarism, machine, they have come to this position.
So, what is happening here is that a bunch of AI techbro morons are speaking the language of disability rights to justify any incredibly stupid position, and the end result of that is people thinking the problem is the way they are talking instead of the fact that a) what they are saying makes nonsense, and b) is trying to justify a very bad thing.
The reason it is stupid is threefold:
1) AI (or, rather, LLM) is not an assistive technology of any sort. It does not help someone do a creative thing, it just...strings together a bunch of stuff that it asserts is a creative thing. There are. indeed, uses of machine learning that are very helpful to disabled writers, like speech-to-text and text-to-speech, or even better predictive text or spelling corrections, that are assistive tech.
But generative LLM Ai is not that because, again, typing a prompt into a screen and having it invent a story is not assisting _you_ write, it is 'writing' for you, and it's not even really doing that. Getting someone else to do things for you is not assistive technology.
2) Of course, if you are disabled, and _need_ things done for you, we shouldn't criticize that. Except, this isn't _that_. There's a difference between saying 'We should have a handicapped accessible bus so disabled people can get between two distance points' and saying 'Handicapped people should hire taxis so they can participate in a fun run', which is, in fact, what NaNoWriMo is. It is not a job, it is not a requirement, it is a self-imposed challenge, and it is utterly insane to think that anyone would even want to hire someone else to do a self-imposed challenge for them.
3) The people saying this, who I remind people are _supposed to be a writing non-profit_ but are actually just now a bunch of AI dudebros who took it over, appear to think that the difficultly in writing is 'Coming up with a concept'. This is, in fact, the exact _opposite_ of a true thing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024”
Yes, after 20 years of not doing that.
Would you like to explain how Israel gets to control part of Syria?
Are we just ignoring the fact that Israel shouldn't be there _regardless_ of what country it is, because it sure as hell isn't Israel.
Oh, but Israel has, in fact, annexed it illegally.
Literally no one asserts that. Israel can control their own borders, although I remind them they have to control their own borders on _their_ side and not the _other_ side, and a military shooting across international borders is generally considered an act of war.
The reason that people assert that Israel did not withdraw because they fully controlled Gaza's other borders. You know, the ones that weren't with Israel.
If we want to pretend that Gaza is a sovereign country, you realize that Israel instantly and immediately committed an act of war by doing that, right? Blockading a country's ocean traffic is an act of war. Just, straight up an act of war.
Those are your two choices: Gaza is a country that Israel started a deliberate war with immediately after it existed, or it was not a sovereign country and was always under Israeli occupation.
"
You know there's a joke about half the countries in the world have been at wart with England?
Anyone want to make a guess as to how many countries Israel has occupied for over a decade?
Four. All of which they have built settlements in and illegally annexed portions of.
The only one it's really given up completely is Egypt's Sinai, which they eventually gave back. That was only only 15 years occupation! It did try to to illegal build settlements in the Sinai, but for some reason just gave up. I suspect Israelregretted that.
Of course, it is entirely possible that what Israel is saying about Sheeba Farms is true, that the Sheeba Farms things is just a pretext by Hezbollah. Complaints about it being part of Lebanon do seem a little late in the process of withdrawal.
Of course, one questions _why_ exactly, Israel is so determine to own this 8.2 square miles of Syria that is almost entirely sheep farms and does not border Israel that they are unwilling to just say 'Here you go, Hezballoh. Now what? That was your issue, right? That's what you said you were fighting over? Well, now what?'
"
Hey LeeEqg, why does Israel think it has a right to Shebaa Farms?
And the usual justification of 'Israel gets to keep it because they seized it in the Six-Day War' (which is not how internationl law works) doesn't even work here, because _Lebanon_ wasn't part of that war.
Do you want to know Israel's position on this?
"Israel says the land was Syrian when it was captured during the Six-Day War, and the dispute is being used by Hezbollah to continue its attacks on Israel."
That is their actual statement, and I urge people to read that sentence a few times just to see how absurd it is.
To clarify the history of the area and what Israel is talking about: Syria used to administer it, but Lebanon sorta felt they had a claim to it. And Syria agreed! Those two countries discussed that in the 50s/60s and decided that Lebanon _should_ own it, and were going to transfer it over, but before they could redraw the borders, the Six-Day War happened.
So, in a way, Israel can make a legal claim that they have stolen the territory (Yes, they have outright annexed it, not just occupied it) from Syria, not Lebanon. In another way, that's obviously stupid, because Israel has no right to annex _Syria_, either.
But a sane person would be asking, at that moment, "Wait, 'the dispute is being used'...so Israel can just call their bluff, give this incredibly unimportant and trivial territory to Lebanon, and...Hezbollah would end up with no excuse to keep fighting?"
But that isn't how Israel thinks, because Israel never gives up stolen territory, even when it, very very obviously, is not theirs. It's why it took a UN resolution and 24 years for them to get out of the rest of Lebanon, and why they are standing there arguing that reslution doesn't say they have to give back a completely unimportant section of land that cannot possibly theirs...because, they argue, they have actually stolen it from Syria, not from Lebanon!
This is territory that, again, Israel has no claim to whatsoever. This isn't even a strategic military location, it is, rather obviously, between Syria and Lebanon, and doesn't touch Israel...in fact, that part of Syria is the Golan Heights and occupied by Israel! If someone in Lebanon wants to attack Israel they'd do it across their shared border instead of firing through Syria!
"
You can hallucinate the PLO didn't leave Lebanon in 1982, but they in fact, did. It's not really debatable.
Israel did not.
"
Hezbollah has literally been at war with Israel since it was created to get Israel out of Lebanon.
Joining with someone who is also at war with Israel does not magically make their _their_ purpose for the war.
"
'Hezbollah no longer has any legitimate grievance with Israel.'
Incorrect. Israel hasn't left the territory. Shebaa Farms is recognized internationally as part of Lebanon, and Israel is still there. Israel justifies this weirdly under the logic that that area is actually part of Syria, which last I checked wasn't part of Israel either. (Syria, weirdly, agrees with Lebanon, that the area is Lebanon.)
It's literally the stated issue that Hezbollah has with Israel, and wow is it weird how we can have huge detailed discussions about how an entity is 'evil Jew-hating' without once actually mentioning their _stated_ problem with Israel? The word 'Shebaa' does not even appear on this entire page before right now. I get not believing stated motives, but it sure is odd how the actual stated problem is not even _known_ to most people discussing things? It's almost as if the discussion is almost irrevocably tilted toward Israel in some weird way.
In fact, people don't actually seem to understand how bad Israel is at actually leaving anywhere. They like to claim they have left, but repeatedly fail to actually fully do so. They will just...keep border territories under completely nonsense justification or claim they need a 'buffer'. (Which, as I remind people every time, no country has a right to build a buffer zone _inside another country_, a thing which should be obvious but somehow isn't.)
Please note that these buffers also, very quickly, get annexed by Israel and Israel rapidly moves to needing a buffer for _those_ areas.
An actual sane country 'under attack form all sides' like Israel claims to be would withdraw to its actual borders and then build a couple of miles of buffer _inside_ those borders, not constantly run around annexing part of Syria and Lebanon and Palestine for 'security'.
"
This is because it has had other countries destabilize it for 70+ years, INCLUDING ISRAEL. Both Israel itself, and the fact Israel drove a hell of a lot of Palestine refugees into Lebanon in the Nakba.
Who did all that, it must be pointed out, BEFORE IRAN. Hezbollah was created (again, without Iran support, that came a few years later) to _oppose Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon_, created to fill that vacuum after the PLO left.
If Israel hadn't been there, Hezbollah never would have existed in the first place for Iran to take over. In fact, Lebanon was pretty pissed at refugee Palestinians and the PLO at that point! (They never even wanted them there to start with. They just weren't willing to shoot them as they were forced over the border.)
If Israel had left, the entire situation was over!
They did not leave.
In fact, Israel shouldn't have even been there to start with. Because, as I mentioned, they screwed around in a civil war and picked some absolutely horrible 'allies' to committed atrocities that Israel has at least an indirect level of culpability in. Hell, they gave our weapons to those people! Just straight up fanatic murderers. (But they were Christian fanatics who murdered Muslims, so that barely counts.)
"
A reminder: A good chunk of Israel's problems in Lebanon are Israel's problem, mostly because Israel feels free to invade south Lebanon whenever it wants.
They also choose to ally, in the civil war that they should not have been involved in, with 'Lebanese Christian Militia', a group that, unequivalently, committed a massacre of civilians, while the IDF, uh, stoppped those civilians from leaving the massacre zone. This is actually what forced Ariel Sharon to resign.
That withdrawal 25 years ago, in 2000? It was ordered by the UN in 1978. Which is when the PLO left. Meanwhile, Israel just continued to be there, long after the PLO had left.
It could have just left in 1978. Instead, it tried to install its own Lebanese government and, quite rightly, caused a lot of resentment. Both of Israel and the US.
Which allowed the creation of Hezbollah, in 1982, by Lebanese clerics. (Later hijacked by Iran.) It also resulted in a lot of attacks on American embassies and bases by various groups.
All of that, literally all of that, could have been averted by Israel just leaving Lebanon after the PLO was gone, which was the supposed reason they were there.
But Israel thinks it can put 'buffer zones' inside of _other countries_, instead of, you know, how it actually works: You put buffers at the border inside _your own_ country. You don't get to steal, in this specific example, 10% of Lebanon!
"
Baby. There was exactly one Jewish baby killed Oct 7th. Her name was Mila Cohen. She was shot while her mother was holding her, probably by accident while attempting to kill her mother.
On “The Unspoken Truth About The Trump Assassination Attempts”
For my non-sarcastic repose to this: I am someone who has pointed out that political violence (At least at the 'destruction of property' level, or even the 'punching na.zis' level, but not killing) is occasionally justified, so I have two points to make here:
a) Using violence against the leader of an authoritarian movement is just going to play exactly into the tropes they want to play into, and in fact they _welcome_ attempted violence. Indeed, the only reason their Jan 6th coup didn't work is antifa _didn't_ show up so Trump had no excuse to declare martial law...that entire thing was supposed to descend into chaos and fighting on the streets, and instead it was just a bunch of right-wing dumbasses yelling, shoving, and trampling police and then running around like idiots hunting for Congresspeople. (We are incredibly lucky the plans for all that got leaked because the right has no actual op-sec.)
All assassinating Trump is going to accomplish is get JD Vance elected, and the martyrdom of Trump would solve a _lot_ of the problems of the actual monsters on the right. Because Trump is, frankly, an idiot who doesn't care about anything, but they could easily take the movement where they want it to go.
b) This person is a noodle-brain conspiracy theorist and even if there was some possible reason to justify violence against Trump, he certainly did not have that as a motive. Which is always the motive of the _first_ people who resort to violence. Their thresholds are stupider and nonsense and often they just want violence as the end in itself.
"
I mean, this is what happens after decades of Democrats promoting 'second amendment remedies' as required to stop authoritarianism.
Hold on, I'm being informed that was Republicans, and by 'authoritarianism' they meant 'the democratically-elected government deciding that you have to get a permit to be a hairdresser and can't gaze your cattle on public lands without paying for it' and not 'someone who attempted to subvert the democratic process via armed militias and might get put back into power and is very blatantly and clearly an authoritarian'.
My bad.
On “Missing the Forest for the Trees on Springfield”
Honestly, looking at BLS data from 2021, it didn't look like much has changed at all since 2021, which is, from what I understand, when this started.
Unemployment has gone down a little, but that's just how it's worked everywhere. And the population doesn't appear to have much changed... If you had shown me the data without telling me what was happening, I would have just assumed it was normal population growth.
... And then I stopped looking at 2021-2024, and looked at 2014-2024.
Seriously, I urge everyone to do that, you will see a town that really was slowly losing its labor force, until it suddenly wasn't. It dropped from 66,000 to around 63,000. It actually gets down the 61,000 but a chunk of that is covid, which complicates all this, but it was clearly dropping rapidly even before that. And then the refugees came in, and bumped it back up by a couple of thousand.
And unlike what people might expect, unemployment went down, not up, probably because these were a lot of young people.
I think people might be exaggerating the decline that the town was in before all this, which is easy to exaggerate because of covid, but, the future didn't look good for this place, long term. And now it does. Mostly because it now looks like normal population growth that you would expect from a town, and not slow decline.
"
Do you really think jokes about politicians and couches are equivalent to claiming that a minority is eating pets?
Can we actually just look at the effects of those two lies to figure out if there is a distinction?
There are armed vigilante hate groups that are hard to call anything but Na.zis, even if they call themselves Proud Boys, that have descended on Springfield Ohio, looking for Haitian refugees that have eaten cats.
Absolutely nothing has happened to JD Vance. The lie wasn't even something that would turn up the rhetoric, it wasn't the sort of lie that would cause violence to start with.
Moreover, in a hypothetical where the lies were the same... Are the powerful not in a much better position to refute lies then the powerless? JD Vance has a national platform, anytime he wants one. Haitian refugees don't.
Also, making up lies about a group of people is fundamentally different than making up lies about one person. Lies about entire groups of people, especially lies about the 'bad behavior' of groups of people, have been responsible for some of the worst behavior of human beings in human history. Lies about individuals generally only impact individuals.
On “Watch And React Live: The Harris Trump Debate”
This debate is how literally every debate with Donald Trump should have gone, because Donald Trump is a giant gift to the debating trick of 'answer the question you want instead of the one you were asked'.
Because with Trump, you not only can answer the question you want, you can make him answer the question that he now wants (aka, is psychologically incapable of refusing) to answer, instead of the one that he should be answering.
For example, as someone who plans to vote for Harris (obviously), I do think it is a valid point that she is refusing to answer the question of why the administration that she is part of hasn't done the things she said she will do.
For the record, I think there are a couple of good answers for that, I'm not really attacking her on that point, but she has managed to not have to answer that question, which is good because those answers would bog down her campaign and not work for everyone.
So she is just ignored it, and that's, I guess, how politics and the media works now. Well, I've known that because that's how Trump has always functioned, but I'm glad that the Democrats have finally realized they don't really have to address anything ever... I mean, I guess I'm not glad about that, actually, but it's better than Democrats trying to address it, thus losing, and someone who I think we all need to admit at this point is an outright fascist getting into office.
It is not the Democrats fault that the media has been utterly destroyed and turned into gibberish, so much so that candidates can get away with not ever addressing things that they should be addressing.
And it has been a really, really long time that I thought a Democrat has run a good campaign, one that actually understands things. Whoever is running hers is astonishing.
On “The Party of the Middle”
It was the show, and Sam wasn't even Captain America at the time, and never had publicly been Captain America. Steve had chosen him, but he decided not to take the position and turned the shield in.
In fact, I'm not entirely certain why he wasn't in jail at the moment... He'd been a fugitive for two years due to the events of Civil War before ceasing to exist for five. I assume there was some sort of off-screen pardon or something
"
*stares at least in amazement*
Are you serious? You think this is a serious point, you think these are important progressive positions that she backed off on?
For one thing, you do realize that the wall thing is the wrong way, right? She possibly accepted the Republican position as a compromise, said she would sign that specific bill because it had a bunch of other stuff in it, despite it having something she didn't like. That's not a position change, and it wouldn't be to the center if it was. That's expressing support for a compromise bill.
Likewise, she has not expressed support for reparations for slavery, in fact there is no support for reparations for slavery in Congress or in the government at all. What there is is a bill that keeps getting reintroduced to create a _commission_ to look into long-term effects of slavery and to make recommendations that Congress could choose to enact into law if it wanted to. Harris's views on this have not changed, the claims that they have changed are based on pretending that her support for that bill to create a commission were support for any particular reparations, which is obviously nonsense. She does not and never had supported any particular reparations, she has and still does support a commission to look into the idea.
Harris still supports electric vehicles as much as she did before. I have no idea what anyone is talking about with a policy change. Sometimes specific bills have failed and people move on to other bills and ways to do things. That does not mean a policy change.
It's the same with these supposed federal jobs guarantee... Harris never supported a federal jobs guarantee as a concept, she just supported a bill that had it in it. The fact she isn't pushing for something that was in a bill she supported once doesn't mean it's a flip flop. You can't just pick random policy positions from bills that people vote on and then claim the fact that they aren't trying to do it years later as a flip-flop, it's just an abandonment of a specific way of doing something.
The mandatory gun buyback thing is actual nonsense, like it's actually incoherent to claim that that is a policy of hers to start with, when that is merely a trivial point in an actual policy. The actual policy is to ban assault weapons, and then she added that they shouldn't be taken away from people who currently have them without compensation. I'm not really certain the people even understand the very basics of this, they are approaching it from such a fundamentally stupid angle that it's hard to discuss it. How is it a conservative position that, if their guns are taking away, people shouldn't be compensated for it? Like, how is that moving to the center to say that? Honestly, I think people getting paid for the weapons they have is actually a conservative position and not paying them would be the liberal one, right? Or does this even matter? This being on the list is just drooling nonsense, in fact everyone who has ever asked her about this in the media is a complete imbecile, I cannot stress that enough.
As far as I can tell, she has not changed her position on 'banning assault weapons'. Period, end of story.
Anyone claiming she has changed positions on these things is kind of an idiot or deliberately misinterpreting things.
Things Harris actually has changed her position on: fracking, border crossing, Medicare for all
The only one of those that got changed for electoral reasons is the border crossing one, mostly because the Republicans are very good at scaremongering about the border.
The fracking thing got changed because of all the money and because Democrats will sell out almost as easily as Republicans. Same with the Medicare for all things, although technically speaking Democrats already sold out like five years ago on that.
Not actual things: banning plastic straws
On “A Cautionary Tale”
I don't know, is being an adult male a preexisting condition?
Here are, literally, the requirements for Medicaid in Georgia:
These are, to be clear, the _current_ requirements for Medicaid. Right now, in 2024.
Note those _also_ require absurdly low income.
It is amazing how many Americans, especially those on the right, are flatly delusional about what Medicaid covered without the expansion.
On “Group Discussion: Banning Social Media Influencers From Small Towns”
I mean, I feel like you're joking, but this is actually how a lot of urban police departments operate, often in incredibly racist ways.
Anyone want to look back up the stats for Ferguson and what was happening there? In the end, the DOJ actually found the Ferguson city council relied on fines and other charges generated by the police for funding municipal services. Like, they literally couldn't operate without the level of fines they were giving out, so had absolutely no incentive to reduce crime.
I just find it funny that no one ever seems to consider doing the same for the crimes that white people commit. Which are actually much worse than in Ferguson, which had fines for such insane things as 'giving the nickname Mike instead of Michael' and fining people for window tint, along with the always fun 'loitering'. At least 'extremely blatant trespassing in direct violation of a no trespassing sign' is a crime that most people agree should be prosecuted.
If this was purely a monetary thing, the police could just stand there and let the money roll in. But of course it's not purely a monetary thing, it's also a system of control and maintaining the status quo and keeping certain underclasses the underclass and not poking the people who are not the underclass.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/2/2024”
The argument that generative AI is not an assistive technology, at all.
Because it does not assist in writing.
It just _does_ writing. The entire thing. From start to end.
Assistive technology enables disabled people to perform tasks, it is not something doing the task _for them_. Having a maid clean your house, while something that is incredibly useful for disabled people, is not an assistive technology.
The problem is that it is often hard to define the actual goals of things being done. Wheelchairs, for example, do not assist with the task of walking...they instead assist with the task of moving from place to place. (Usually shorthanded as 'mobility')
It is easy to think that AI helps with writing, but what it actually helps with is 'Having the end result of a bunch of text'. Which is, of course, not what writing is. Writing is the process of turning ideas into a coherent written whole.
There are ways to assist with that, such as speech-to-text and even grammar tools, and ways that could actually use AI, like something that ready the story well enough to understand it and pointed out problems, aka, a hypothetical real-time editor, which is not something that does exist but could.
But _generative_ AI is not assisting with writing. It is _doing_ the writing itself, and pretty poorly, and there's almost no circumstances where it would do it better than a disabled human anyway.
"
Also, Jaybird, I'm starting to get the idea that maybe you are not a creative writer?
I don't even call myself a writer, not really, but I do write creatively, in fact, one of the things I write is DC fanfic, and, again, coming up with a premise is trivial.
'Ho do you come up with your idea?' is almost the definition of a question that annoys writers, because coming up with ideas is trivial. It not only is merely the first step of writing, it's barely a step at all.There are literally _people who cannot write_, children who are too young to read and write, that come up with ideas for stories. There are automated writing prompt generators that randomly output characters, verbs, locations, actions, etc, that could come up with your idea!
AI techbros fundamentally misunderstand the actual difficult part of the writing process and think that because they have 'ideas', that is the same as being a writer. (Same with art, incidentally.)
Writing those ideas down is much more difficult, and writing them _meaningfully_ instead of just 'a bunch of stuff happens' is even harder. That is what writing is, not 'having ideas'. AIs can sorta to the first part, via plagerism, but that just creates uniformly bad writing.
And the only reason that generated writing looks passable is that it is absurdly over-the-top deliberate scenery-chewing puns, which is basically _supposed_ to sound like hackney writing. Which is entirely in character for Condiment King, who was designed as a throwback to 1966 Batman.
Try doing it an actual conversation set before that between, let's say, Bruce and Damien Wayne, Bruce having drug Damien to the fair to make him be social, and them running across an adult Dick Grayson who is attending of his own free will to watch this contest...and I came up with that combination in about 60 seconds, it wasn't writing.
I could write it, it honestly isn't very far from the stuff I do write, but it sure as hell would be a lot more work. So let's see the AI result.
"
Why not ask the AI for 50,000 words of that, and then, hey, you just finished NaNoWriMo ! Congratulations!
Actually, you don't even need the premise! You can just have it write 50,000 words of anything. Or, actually, even easier...I have an epub reader on my computer I can copy things out of, you can just get one of those, and copy text from an existing book.
I might do that this NaNoWriMo.
It's sorta the same way, and people don't know, but I hold the world record in marathon time. It's not official marathon or anything, just the distance, but I used assistive technology, namely, my car, to complete a marathon a few years ago in less than 30 minutes.
Yay us! We're really winning at these self-imposed challenges. Look at all those dumbasses doing things the long way.
On “Group Discussion: Banning Social Media Influencers From Small Towns”
It's kinda weird how cops never seem to just wait and arrest these sort of people. Just stand there, out of sight, wait for someone to climb over the fence with a posted No Trespassing right, and immediately arrest them. Or who drive a RV ten feet onto a road clearly marked to not allowed RVs. Park a cop car twenty fee down the road, out of sight, sirens flip on, people get an immediate ticket.
Seems like it would be a bunch of easy arrests. I know there are arguments the system would be overwhelmed, but they have not even _started_. And surely word would spread.
I mean, isn't this the premise of 'tough on crime' the 'broken windows' policing, that if you start enforcing this stuff, everything else gets better? It sure is odd how much the police force is working to try to divert people away, instead of just locking them up and sending a message. Or at minimum towing their cars.
It's almost as if the cops think there's certain kinds of people who should be arrested, and another kind of people who should just be warned, and the actual problem here that the 'people who should just be warned' are an infinite supply of stupidity rotating in, so the warnings never matter.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/2/2024”
It's because it's their second draft at a conclusion. Their first on was 'AI is great, use it'. Because, they are, in fact, sponsored by AI companies now after everyone else fled.
The whole 'AI will work as editor' is not only a retroactive justification, but there are not really any AI tools that do that. Grammar and spell checkers have existed for decades, but are not AI at all. Text-to-speech _can_ be machine learning, but literally no one has ever had a problem with writers (Or anyone) using that, and it's generally not considered AI at all, despite machine learning often called AI.
You know, if anyone every ones the almost definitive example of motte and bailey, here it is:
"You need to condemn AI, by which I and everyone else complaining very clearly mean generative AI"
"AI not only includes generative AI, but includes all sorts of machine learning, including things possible helpful for disabled writers. Hence we cannot condemn categorically."
"Do you condemn _generative AI_?"
*crickets*
Or:
NaNoWriMo, original draft: Stabbing people is fine.
Everyone: WTF? No it's not. The community condemns stabbing people. You need to take that back and condemn stabbing people!
NaNoWriMo, second draft:There are two forms of stabbing, consensual and non-consensual. Doctors often stab people, with consent, and it's ableism to deny people the healthcare they need. Thus, we cannot categorically condemn stabbing people.
Everyone: ....so you condemn the non-consensual stabbing subcategory, right? Cause you didn't say that, you didn't say those words, you just sorta hoped we read that into the statement. Which is exceptional weird after you had to sit down and explain the two kinds of stabbing.
NaNoWriMo: ...
"
Saul, please do a little more research here. NaNoWriMo are a shit organization, and the statement they released at that link is a backtrack of their original position of 'Any AI is fine!'
And they took that position because the only people willing to sponsor them after last year, when all their volunteers quit, is the AI industry, who has never had a problem being child-abuse adjacent.
"
In case people are unaware, NaNoWriMo _imploded_, very spectacularly, last year. This is because they defended someone who abused children, and then basically had _all_ volunteers leave, en mass, because of their response to everything.
They also lost all their sponsors. Except, of course, the AI techbros who, are always willing to step in and dump huge amounts of cash on cash on things.
And because AI techbros will say and do literally anything to justify heir plagiarism, machine, they have come to this position.
So, what is happening here is that a bunch of AI techbro morons are speaking the language of disability rights to justify any incredibly stupid position, and the end result of that is people thinking the problem is the way they are talking instead of the fact that a) what they are saying makes nonsense, and b) is trying to justify a very bad thing.
The reason it is stupid is threefold:
1) AI (or, rather, LLM) is not an assistive technology of any sort. It does not help someone do a creative thing, it just...strings together a bunch of stuff that it asserts is a creative thing. There are. indeed, uses of machine learning that are very helpful to disabled writers, like speech-to-text and text-to-speech, or even better predictive text or spelling corrections, that are assistive tech.
But generative LLM Ai is not that because, again, typing a prompt into a screen and having it invent a story is not assisting _you_ write, it is 'writing' for you, and it's not even really doing that. Getting someone else to do things for you is not assistive technology.
2) Of course, if you are disabled, and _need_ things done for you, we shouldn't criticize that. Except, this isn't _that_. There's a difference between saying 'We should have a handicapped accessible bus so disabled people can get between two distance points' and saying 'Handicapped people should hire taxis so they can participate in a fun run', which is, in fact, what NaNoWriMo is. It is not a job, it is not a requirement, it is a self-imposed challenge, and it is utterly insane to think that anyone would even want to hire someone else to do a self-imposed challenge for them.
3) The people saying this, who I remind people are _supposed to be a writing non-profit_ but are actually just now a bunch of AI dudebros who took it over, appear to think that the difficultly in writing is 'Coming up with a concept'. This is, in fact, the exact _opposite_ of a true thing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.