State of the Discussion

If people REALLY want to hurt Musk, they should lobby for the removal of regulatory credits they sell to other automakers. "In Q4 2024, Tesla earned $692 million from selling regulatory credits, accounting for nearly 30% of its quarterly net income of $2.33 billion."

And, many types of folks like Teslas, which for the life of me makes no sense, but hey, you want to lug around a 1-3 thousand pound battery and be limited to a short distance of travel, be my guest, just don't make me have one.

It takes two steps: first, you have to send an invitation to someone, and second, when creating a group, you have to put their name in. If you have people in your contacts with very similar names, it's probably pretty easy to include the wrong person in both steps if you're not paying attention to what you're doing. Which, I mean, it's been a while since I last created a national security chat, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd be a bit more careful about adding people than they seem to have been.

A fun possibility is that the initial invite to Goldberg was intentional, because dude was using his personal Signal account and he was just adding a lot of media contacts, but then he used his personal Signal account to talk about national security sh*t.

While amusing I think this is just what happens when you staff your admistration with whatever is worse than backbenchers (nosebleeders?) and media personalities who have never been accountable for anything of significance. Don't let Fox News fool you, the people on that chat are better understood as JV dilettantes with very low IQs. They aren't taking cues from the great unwashed involved in 1/6.

Getting opsec about the President's followers to prevent them from doing the President's will seems a little risky politically and normally unnecessary.

Law enforcement didn't realize they were going to have to deal with the President enflaming things as opposed to telling everyone to go home.

When there is this much of a opposition to power over this long of a period of time, the calculus seems to shift to it being a question of whether it'll happen before the guy dies (maybe *VERY* shortly) or after. I don't think that Erdogan can survive a second Ankara.

I'd say 1,2,8 & 10 were the big problems.

RE: No need to change

Team Blue had an openly unfit leader who no one dared point out wore no clothes. Then they replaced him with a women whose big abilities were her race and her gender, and who over two election cycles got zero delegates to secure the nod.

I'm thinking there's room for improvement in there somewhere.

1) Don't pick a VP unless they can head the ticket.

2) If the top guy is unfit, have him actually step down. Harris the President would have been Presidential and wouldn't have been able to run both against and for Joe.

3) Replace your guy earlier.

Happy Nowruz everybody. I was at my second Nowruz celebration with my partner last night. Yesterday was a Zoroastrian Nowruz. It's pretty interesting comparing and contrasting how one small insular ethnoreligious group deals with things compared to your small ethnoreligious group, especially when they occupy the same socio-economic niche:

1. The Zoroastrian approach to politics and society seems to be keep out and keep your head down. This is the complete opposite of the Jewish approach. Whether we are Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, left or right, Zionist or anti-Zionist, Jews dod not keep out and keep our heads down. Our approach is more like "just because we might be 1% or less of the population, doesn't give you a right to boss us around. Fish you."

2. Zoroastrians seem to have no need to update or modernize their religion while the modernizers, traditionalists, and everything in-between was fighting over the religion since the early 19th century.

Again, to repeat what is actually being talking about, the actual topic of discussion: this is the world that a lot of people wanted. “if you have the Wrong Politics you should be punished”, that’s what we heard was Good, that’s what we heard Ought To Happen.

The minimal example of this is showing somewhere where people with the wrong politics got punished for those politics. (Which doesn't have to literally be the thing punished, we understand pretense.)

And then, the next step would be to show that the people don't like what's happening now did like that example. (Or, at minimum, it wasn't the exact same people doing both instances!)

Is censorshp for stuff like “Fauci funded the labs that leaked Covid 19” considered “prosecution” or is it merely censorship?

I feel like you read summaries of his letter, and then people building giant conspiracies off them, and not the actual letter, which weirdly is difficult to find on any media account talking about it. Here it is: https://jcpost.com/posts/17fc484f-376a-4e91-b411-3e3835407b46

You may notice it actually says it was ultimately their decision. Just, straight up, the government didn't make them do it. It also doesn't say _anything_ about political speech near Covid-19, and in fact the only speech it calls out as places the government went too far is humor and satire.

Facebook did restrict posts about lab leaks. That is true. There is _absolutely_ no evidence that the government even vaguely hinted to do that. Zuckerberg's letter does not say it or even imply it. And, of course, that Facebook restriction started in in 2020, under Trump, and was lifted two months into the Biden administration!

So once again we are pointing at the Trump administration, although in this case it's not even true!

Is lèse-majesté being defined so narrowly that it only applies to stuff like this or does even stuff like that not count because it’s not an example of criticizing *BIDEN* and, anyways, it didn’t stick?

That _is_ someone arrested for criticizing the government, or at least mocking them. By a local sheriff.

Which is why charged were dropped, and why he rightly sued the police. And then failed, because of laws essentially saying you cannot sue the police.

So you found the first requirement, someone being punished for clear political speech, although it didn't get very far before the courts shot it down. Alright, we got one! The system did eventually work, but it was bad it happened at all.

So we can now we can ask ourselves: Who are the people objecting to the Trump's administration current fascistic behavior of detaining tourists for weeks without charge because those people don't like the Trump administration...

...and are they traditionally people who would be defending the behavior of the cops in this story?

The guy from Inglorious Basterds was in there too?

Man, talk about bad OpSec.

Edit to add: On the plus side, can we all not stand back an appreciate how far we've come from an insecure home email server to using state of the art dual encryption?

So, I preordered Shadows because I loved Odyssey and Valhalla, and I loved Ghost of Tsushima. I basically didn't care about the delays in release. I figured if all they did was put the Valhalla gameplay in fedual Japan, that's good enough for me. That is pretty much exactly what it is with a couple of new mechanics that are good.

I have about four hours into it. Why so few? I'm a middle aged dad with responsibilities. Finishing Valhalla took me the better part of ... five months? Maybe six?

I am not woke or leftist in the slightest. I don't care about representation in games or the gaming industry. I just care about if I have fun because it's a hobby. And Shadows is fun.

You don't even have to play as Yasuke for much of the game if you don't want to. There's a prologue where you play as both him and Naoue, and then an extended section where you can only play as Naoue apparently. Then you gain the ability to switch between them. They have different abilities. He's all ground attack. A tank that just muscles through everything, including shut/locked doors. She's a ninja, stealthy and speedy. He parries, while she dodges. She has a grappling hook to reach high places. He can't climb/parkour as well as she can. You get the picture.

But regardless of what style you want to play, both characters seem pretty cool. Yasuke - a slave of some Portugese priests (I presume they're templars, we'll see) whom a Japanese warlord becomes fascinated with bc he's never seen a black man before. It's basically Shogun. Naoue, a ninja with a pretty dramatic opening back story that I won't spoil although you'll see it coming a mile away.

Look, ninjas and samurai are fun. I don't care if the makers of the game want to make a social statement by making the samurai black and putting non-binary NPC's in the game. It has no bearing on how fun it is to play ninja and go around making the markers on the map disappear, assassinate every bad guy on the island, explore feudal Japan, etc.

Thanks, hadn't seen that.

So the French Scientist was randomly selected for screening and the TSA (mis-)characterized them as "hate and conspiracy messages" that the FBI investigated and dropped?

Seems like shockingly bad luck and sub-optimal, yes. I'm at least a little curious whether they were orangeman bad memes or kinda unhinged hate speech that would get you arrested in the UK -per links above - by way of comparison.

The other example from Newsweek was:

"Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a physician at Brown Medicine in Rhode Island, held a "valid" H-1B visa when she was detained at Boston's Logan International Airport last week. She was returning to the U.S. following a trip to Lebanon to visit family. U.S. officials said she had photos of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose funeral she attended."

Seems potentially optimal... she wasn't randomly searched, but rather either the DHS knew she attended the funeral and barred her entry or she voluntarily said she attended the funeral (reporting isn't certain on either of these points) and her case was referred to DHS.

I will, however, adjust my priors one-tick to the left that 'maybe' this is something keeping an eye on to see if it's a real pattern emerges.

Lee: The people screaming genocide were applying the very broadly defined Convention Against Genocide to the Israel-Hamas War.

Many of the screaming people also talk about "deliberating targeting civilians". They're using the same definition I am and don't understand they've just defined all wars as genocide.

They also don't understand that Hamas not reporting how many of it's soldiers died doesn't mean everyone was a civilian. They especially don't understand dead civilians in Gaza are morally on Hamas' ticket and not Israel's.

Lee: Hamas action on 10/7 were an attempted genocide under this definition.

Hamas killed or kidnaped every Jew they could, civilian or solider. This was their plan and their goal. That's genocide under any definition.

Is censorshp for stuff like "Fauci funded the labs that leaked Covid 19" considered "prosecution" or is it merely censorship?

Is lèse-majesté being defined so narrowly that it only applies to stuff like this or does even stuff like that not count because it's not an example of criticizing *BIDEN* and, anyways, it didn't stick?

Oh, so now we see that prosecution for criticism of the government has melted away to 'prosecution for things the person who said them said were satire but the government says were election fraud'.

Neither satire nor election fraud are criticism of the government in the slightest. It doesn't even matter what the facts of the case are, or even if it's a first amendment violation.(1) It isn't about criticizing the government, at all.

But the fact this this does not even _vaguely_ fit the thing being discussed means that Jaybird wins because he gets to claim the goalposts were moved, despite the fact he, very very clearly, is the person who moved them.

In fact, this seems to be a case that conservatives love to stretch to somehow be a political prosecution, they love the idea it was brought under Biden, apparently because they don't know how time works and thinks Biden could be behind charges that were filed Jan 27, 2021, a week into his term in office and months before his Attorney General took power, and while all the USAs were still Trump appointed.

To repeat: This is a prosecution that actually happened under Trump, even if filed seven days after he left, and Trump's people were still in there and did this entire case. It seems extremely unlikely it was politically motivated.

1) For the record, neither Harvard Law, which claims it sets a troubling first amendment violation about how to treat online culture, nor the appeals courts, which has stayed the sentence pending appeal, liked the results, and I agree with them. There is very little evidence this meme mislead anyone, and he should not be prosecuted for this. Or at best, a small fine to discourage this sort of behavior...there are things that are supposed to override first amendment concerns, and making sure the actual election process is not subject to disinformation and people can vote is one of them, but this punishment seems way out of line.

But, again, this is not about criticism of the government. At all. Nor was it done by someone who who targeted him for political purposes.

Or to put it another way: The troubling part of this case is the fact it was actually satire. It is entirely constitutional under the 1st amendment for people to be prosecuted for deliberately misleading people about how the mechanical process of an election works in such a way that their vote will not count. That is not generally in dispute. If you dispute it, say so.

I believe that that is the joke.

The humor comes from imagining that someone on the other team is so dumb that they'd believe that this is true.

Then you share it with your like-minded friend and you both laugh because ingroup/outgroup.

He went to jail for it. Not banned. Not ratioed.