I sorta agree with a lot of what you’re saying; not completely but I think you might have misconstrued some of what I was getting at here.

The US State Dept does a lot of good work

Agreed

There has been no “imperial” ambitions under the Biden administration; quite the opposite, really in countering imperial ambitions of Putin, while also coming down harder on Israel than quite literally any past Presidential administration in history

Agreed

Because the election is 62 days away. Withdrawing aid from Israel will immediately by framed by right-wing media, Republican opposition, AIPAC, Russian and Israeli troll farms as being “Antisemitic.”

Agreed

I’m not going to subscribe to this notion that they’re some inherently evil entity

I didn’t say they were evil. I said they’re not your friend; I think it’s weird for them to be showing up with a guitar like we’re gonna hang out.

Put it this way: If one of my neighbors regularly made phone calls ordering people to be killed, I wouldn’t hang out with them. Like if they showed up to a party with a guitar, I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my head that they might wake up the next morning and decide that a bunch of Houthis need to die, and then make it happen in the course of their working day. That’s weird.

I mean it is fine. You’re not wrong. And I have the luxury of sitting here in my safe little bubble protected by these wide luxury oceans with dudes staying up all night watching the satellites, making sure nothing geopolitically bad happens to anything American anywhere in the world. I definitely think that the US empire is by far the most benevolent of the big empires available in the world today. That’s a pretty fuckin low bar, but sure, I accept it. I mean I’m sitting safe and happy inside it and not trying to put a stop to it or anything so I might as well.

But at the same time, there’s people waking up in hell on earth right now. Like coming awake not eating for two days, hungry with their kids crying, some of their kids just gone killed by the shelling, no food, no toilets, just a big dusty hellscape with more death and misery and emptiness all around them. I get it that at this point we gotta just let that happen, I guess? It just doesn’t seem like too much of a fuckin priority to make it stop. We’re sort of trying, but not on the same level as if it was happening in Philly or Austin or something (or in Tel Aviv.)

I definitely won’t disagree with you about what Trump will do or the electoral calculus of supporting Israel. I’m just saying, you can’t be helping make that happen (or whatever other “lesser evil” atrocity, including the intermittency of our support for Ukraine and our weird little pussyfooting rules about how they’re allowed to fight back) and then be friends and show up with a guitar like it’s all cool. Yeah, I’m glad we have professionals keeping things under control. It is fine. But it would take a lot more humanity from the State Dept before I would really like something like this.

Look, I love this country. Part of why I love it is that streak of anti-authoritarianism that keeps the empire stuff in check, which leads to a lot of the good behavior you’re talking about, and also a lot of the rock and roll we make. I’m just saying… play some other fuckin’ song. “Rockin’ in the Free World” is a song of desperation inside the inhuman system that is America. It’s the homeless guy who knows it’s getting colder with winter coming on and still doesn’t have a place to go. It’s trying to keep hope alive even when you’ve given up on anything you can see or interact with to ever be deserving of hopefulness. You can’t be part of the system and play it unless you are actively fuckin fixing things (I’m not saying Blinken is not, you have a point about that part, but… Gaza.)

If you’re in Ukraine, and you want to play a kind of dark Neil Young song you can still rock out to, play “Powderfinger” about the kid who’s too young to be using a rifle but has to pick one up, all scared, because someone’s coming for his family. Or just play RHCP and blow off some steam. You can bring some America stuff and everyone can have a good time. I just feel like maybe he’s playing it thinking like “fuck yeah rock and roll” and I don’t know whether it’s occurred to him that a lot of the dark horrors that the song talks about are still going on, and for some people in the world he’s the central symbol of the system that’s exporting them to other countries so they can experience them too.

at least he’s got the balls to go to Kyiv in the first place unlike his predecessors

Yeah. This part, I like. We need more of this.

Edit: I got curious and I watched this. JESUS CHRIST MAKE IT STOP. As with many things, George Carlin said it far more succinctly than I could.

I gotta say

1. Fuck imperialism; the US State Dept is not your friend and they’re not supposed to be
2. The idea of the US Secretary of State playing guitar in a nightclub in Kyiv while supporting them in a war against imperialism is actually kind of incongruously good, gives me some kind of hope WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SENDING WEAPONS TO ISRAEL STILL
3. From the short clip, that sounds like one of the least hip performances of an inherently pretty good song I have ever heard 😢
4. For the uninitiated

1. Stop calling it “the fediverse”

It’s a well trodden path at this point

GOP: I’m gonna do WHATEVER I want whenever I want up to and including KILL YOU AND FUCKIN CIVIL WAR if you try to stop me

Also GOP: Whoa whoa whoa, where’s my entitlement thing you were supposed to give me, this isn’t fair! More pls. Give more. I need it and you’re supposed to give it to me.

It’s like living with a teenager in the house who also for some reason has a handgun.

Almost all nuclear weapons require quite a bit of expertise to maintain over time. If they got sold off 30 years ago, chances are 99% that they’re mostly good for lighting off as a dirty bomb and not much else at this point.

Dude, you’re making yourself more important than you actually are. No one cares about you.

Seriously. The West keeps legit forgetting the whole thing is even going on, and then waking up and sending $50 billion and then getting distracted again.

The bravery of the Ukrainians and the 20:1 outmatchedness of the Russians in total industrial/technological capacity are responsible for the failure of the invasion. Not any kind of urgent priority or strong level of care on the Western side in any location west of Poland.

Everyone wants to belong

Everyone wants allies, close friends, brothers and sisters they can rely on and love and support

In the modern world we have pale imitations and crap. There is no village, there is only a dim landscape through which we shuffle, largely alone.

And so there is craving for some substitute, because the under structure is unfulfilled

Copilot and that whole model is a bunch of shit

Get Claude.ai, do the thing of pasting the code you want it to modify into the chat window, and it’ll spit back out some modified sections of code you can put back into the file. It is more time consuming, but it actually works.

For intense operations you can make a project, upload the main headers and documentation, and it’ll absorb them into its sphere of awareness and start being able to take account of them when it does the above in chats within that project.

It is not perfect (as no LLM assist is) but it saves a lot of time and is not beset with the growing incompetence and failure with which OpenAI seems to be afflicted more and more with every passing month

It seems unlikely that it’s all that mysterious

OpenAI/Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google

There you go I solved the mystery

BOB: Well, when you have TIME magazine do a cover story on Palestinian rights you see that the perception of the problem is changing.

Any fuckin day now

I’m the super paranoid guy about all of this stuff and this exact same thing occurred to me

Why are there a few different changes to sub and site policy connected with the concept of “misinformation”, but somehow skirting around the type of misinformation which it seems is the most pressing issue by far? I.e. accounts which are devoted to posting misinformation?

Honestly I thought the vegan cat food thing was handled semi ok. But surely that’s not the more pressing thing, to justify big team meetings and huge changes to policy and writing misinformation stuff into the legal side and user agreement.

Right?

It is registered as a bot and shows for me as a bot. I prefer to keep it around and heckle it as opposed to “out of sight out of mind.”

The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard.

Hmmm

This is a weird framing. The story’s not wrong, I am sure, but it’s just sort of askew.

I will make a maybe unwarranted prediction that I will find some other curious opinions being voiced by the specific journalist who wrote this story.

Brb

Edit: I am wrong. They’re just reporting from inside Ukraine stuff that is happening and so this is a relevant story.

Go fuck yourself

?

I think you may be thinking of a different scandal; this one’s victim was a girl named Cindy.

Yes, I’m aware. Can I help you with anything else?

Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.

If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.

Not covered in this story: The church leadership says hey he told us about it but we thought it was with a “young lady” and whatevs it was all cool, we’re as shocked as you are it is horrible

The victim says what the fuck I have been telling them about it FOR YEARS NOW

Time for today’s fun game!

“Is it Georgia the repressive country or Georgia the aspiringly-repressive US state” has been replaced by “Is it Colombia the sometimes unstable and badly governed country or Columbia the sometimes unstable and always badly governed US university”