The US is providing about a quarter of Ukraine’s defense budget at this point, the EU another quarter, and Ukraine the remaining half.

For the size and money disparity between the countries, it is surprising that the US is doing so little. The US military industrial complex has a bad habit it gets into where it often will give enough aid not to lose, but also not enough to win. Dan Ellsberg called it “The Stalemate Machine” and explained how it works in pretty heartbreaking detail.

Works both ways, but it seems like weird way to spend your time trying to act like you’re a voice of reason in front of an audience you’ve already embarrassed yourself in front of many times.

I still remember when you claimed with a straight face that Israel was using nuclear weapons in Syria, and the only reason I didn’t know about it was because I was confused by Western propaganda.

https://lemmy.world/post/23537807/14158168

You’re probably right that as far as the present community’s viewpoint, I am “embarrassing myself” and you are “pointing out” things and so on. That’s because the present community’s viewpoint is detached from reality and based on groupthink, confident presentations, and hostility to outsiders and not much else.

You guys are welcome to your “community,” I guess. I’ve made the point and then belabored it a little bit, I don’t see the point in a continued back and forth so I won’t waste more time.

It’s not “harassment” to disagree, even disagree in a pointed fashion.

Like if someone came onto lemmy.world and made a joke about how bad the moderation is, that’s not “harassment.” That’s just them speaking their mind. In any reasonable space that kind of thing is allowed. I know that on lemmy.ml, it is sometimes not. Maybe in this case it is not? I don’t know. Maybe it is, let’s see.

I’m well aware that lemmy.ml as a community doesn’t tolerate being spoken to in such a disobedient fashion or criticized. I think that’s silly. My comment was sincerely not badly intended, just more along the lines of “wake up you guys are being ridiculous” (both about the screaming intoleration of anyone in American politics who seems like they might be poised to make some kind of progress, and also now about the defensive hivemind behavior that gets all bent out of shape about anyone who disagrees with the herd about that or various other issues).

Up to you man. It was meant as a one-off comment, but of course in standard lemmy.ml fashion now we have to have a big conversation about it where you continue to comment hostility to try to discourage anyone from speaking their mind about that kind of thing in the future. The purpose is to silence dissent. I probably won’t really go back and forth about it (what even would be the point?), but that’s my intent in making these comments. If I was trying to harass I would probably come to .ml more often, but I don’t, I only found this one because it was a crosspost.

https://clip.cafe/tombstone-1993/i-abhor-ugliness-does-mean-were-not-friends-any-more/

2035: In other news, the newly reanimated body of Karl Marx has been elected to the Virginia House of Representatives

Lemmy.ml: Until he’s willing to CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY call it a “genocide” and STRONGLY indicate support for trans rights he’s STILL FUCKING DEAD TO ME I’m voting for Jill Stein

Orwell’s description of “doublethink” is extremely accurate. They know that the left is violent and wild, like really believe it, and they also believe that their opponents deserve death and it’s a good thing when it happens.

The brain is a powerful tool. Once you teach it certain self-deceptive patterns it will happily sabotage itself if that’s what you want it to do. Skillful use of language (“violence” versus “what they deserve”) is key.

Matrix is an absolutely pale imitation of Discord.

Yes it is very upsetting that the most popular chat platform in the Western world is in league with Sauron, but Matrix as a replacement is a glorified ICQ client that regularly yells at you that your device is untrusted now and there’s no hope of fixing it, you loser.

Coincidentally I saw this not long ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJU3AuF3AWs&t=6526s

There is quite a lot of backstory going back through all the extensive extensive video obviously, but basically this woman’s mom consulted with a lot of expert help and sorted out exactly how to strategically break her daughter out of the cult.

“She still believed in Jordan’s mythology, she still loved him and missed him, but she was realizing that the most stressful thing in her life was him, that she dreaded his letters and phone calls. Her month at home eventually passed and it was time for her to return to Virginia to be with Jordan. Don’t worry. It was all part of her mother’s plan, which Abby has since dubbed ‘operation catch and release.’”

Ask thought-provoking questions while being warm and curious. Be prepared to listen deeply. You will know if you have listened well if you can repeat back to them what they said. Be humble and open to hearing what they say.

Keep conversations positive, productive, and civil. Never get angry. Stay resourceful. It is better to end the interaction than to say something counter-productive.

I feel like almost all of this post is also just general good advice in general.

Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they’re doing, just being “ML experts” all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation’s Google-money.

Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?

Spoken like someone who’s never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs… just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.

“AI? Yes please! Here’s some money, I’ve heard of Firefox so I know you’re good for it.” It’s not really any more complicated than that, I don’t think.

No matter how unjust it’s been, the only imaginable way out is to somehow let him “save face" what ever that means in this situation.

It is literally a cliche of geopolitics for the mighty empire to continue the senseless and horrific war against some small country that’s effectively defending itself, year after year, because of this logic. But then in the end to reluctantly agree to the “unimaginable” way out (saving face with some kind of explanation that literally no one believes), because at the end of the day, the simple physics of the situation will allow nothing else.

I more or less agree with you about Putin’s logic and mindset actually. My overall point is there is more than one country and leader in the world that can be stubborn. The defenders are often more stubborn, at the end of the day, it turns out (to the shock and confusion of the attackers who thought they had a monopoly.)

So what they’ve done in Ukraine is completely unjustified? In your opinion?

This is just bait lol

Get a room you two

Sure, it would be nice if Russia simply left Ukraine, but put yourself in Putin’s position - it’s a complete non-solution. You don’t fold after going all in. It’s an incredibly naive thing to say

This is exactly the kind of logic someone would use to justify either of the examples I brought up. Exactly.

The fact that he really doesn’t want to stop killing innocent people, and so he would have to pay the “cost” of doing something he doesn’t want to do, isn’t a justification. I would actually really like for him to be arrested on that ICC warrant and try to explain this exactly logic at the Hague. I think it would be great. I would support him using that defense, I think it would be wonderful to see. People could decide whether to accept the logic, and then whether to hang him or not depending on whether they bought into it as a good reason for continuing to kill innocent people on an industrial scale.

Yeah, I get it. You’re not wrong.

No, it’s on par with telling someone “Well, you shouldn’t keep driving drunk then” or “You should 100% stop contacting her and move on if she keeps instantly blocking you on every new platform you try on.” Certain actions really are under voluntary control. We’re not telling Russia they really need to shape up that GDP if they want the world to take them seriously. We’re asking them to stop deciding to kill innocent people. Seems legit. The obstacle is that they really want to, and they’re reluctant to stop.

(The analogy is flawed because there’s no real equivalency between driving drunk and maybe rolling the dice on killing one family, and yourself, versus doing it to members of a million families. But the simplicity of the solution is the same.)

Holy shit

I’m not watching this entire thing, but it’s bad. I watched some sections and holy shit.

The first random thing I happened upon was Hasan talking about trans issues, overtalking someone from the chat who disagreed with him and demanded evidence which was literally open on his screen at the time, called them transphobic (?), then banned a trans person who chimed in to say that yes they agreed and Hasan was doing a bad job arguing for trans issues, and then spent extensive time berating them on stream, wishing bad things on them in the future…

I honestly can’t even do it justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCFycPw3fI&t=575s

Holy crap man. I generally sort of discount people trying to find reasons to nitpick some leftist voice, because pretty much everyone has some kind of imperfection and whatever, it’s fine, we don’t need to constantly be shedding allies because fuck anyone who ever did something allegedly etc etc whatever. Anyone can have a bad day if they’re on streams a ton of the time… but this is bad. And it makes me not surprised at all if he has the same type of super-confident wrong take on geopolitical issues.

Edit: Also, by far the saddest thing is the nonstop scroll of people cheering him on and celebrating this person getting banned, just whizzing by in the chat. Shit is fucked. Our society is in a bad state.

Not really. The two have nothing to do with each other.

“The Chinese government shouldn’t have shot all those people in Tienanmen Square.” “Yeah, but you have to remember Western imperialism.”

“The Khmer Rouge shouldn’t have killed a quarter of their country’s population.” “Yeah, but you have to remember the Vietnam War.”

“Ireland shouldn’t have covered up for sex-abusing priests.” “Yeah, but you have to remember Protestant oppression of the Catholics…”

The whole premise is nonsense. I do know people from outside the US who took this attitude to Putin, I can think of specific ones of them that I talked with about Putin and they told me I was an ignorant American, more or less, and Ukraine’s not innocent and the US intentions in Ukraine are not good either. They thought it was hilarious that I was all heated up about Putin and (in their minds) not heated up about the US government doing more or less the exact same thing in their region of the world for the last several decades.

And then the 2022 invasion happened.

And as soon as it was apartment blocks and hospitals blowing up, power plants, shelling Chernobyl, kidnapping kids and taking them back to Russia, they all of a sudden got real fuckin’ quiet about Putin kind of being an admirable guy because, what the hell at least he’s trying to stand up to the US instead of getting fucked around by them or else making corrupt deals like everyone else. They weren’t stupid or naive about what a war like that meant, who was paying the horrifying price, or how much or how little it was doing to solve American imperialism anywhere else in the world. And so they were shocked and horrified, watching the scale of the suffering. They didn’t want to try to do little backflips to connect it to some kind of noble cause somewhere else that it was supposedly in service of.

Any other reaction, honestly to me, means you are at best some kind of sheltered and elitist person, some kind of person who feels like making excuses for innocent people dying because you want to cling to some pet theory. As the person in Hasan’s chat very succinctly alluded to, I would never make that kind of excuse on behalf of the US, or for Israel or any other horrifying state-power entity that’s doing awful things and spreading around propaganda about it. So why is Hasan doing it? That’s fuckin’ weird, don’t do that.

I don’t really have a problem with someone being a streamer or being successful. I was always kind of on the fence about Hasan (still am actually), I like him because he is a strong leftist voice and maybe I should not be nitpicking him here. This is the first really dumb thing I’ve heard him say.

I guess I see him, after seeing this, as similar to Joe Rogan for the left: He’s actually generally sensible, he has a very loyal audience who mostly lines up with his political leaning, but he talks about complex issues without really understanding them (or apparently even trying to), which makes him vulnerable to saying or promoting total bullshit by accident. Case in point…