There’s a certain spirit of online debate about trivial or nonsensical things like this that can best be understood as happening purely for the sport of it.

This is goin’ in tha book.

So when Ukrainians try to push for closer alignment with the EU it’s a Washington-backed color revolution and thus is no different than Russia rolling into the literal tanks.

Like, even if you’re not a Russian troll you’re still adopting a conspiracy theory that completely ignores any agency the Ukrainian people have.

But only the specific subset of anarchists that I read about first in my early 20s! All the others are just like those fascists in the Judean People’s Front!

Of course, some months later as fall approached, travellers saw stretched between the ruined pillars a banner proclaiming: Spirit Halloween Now Hiring!

Obligatory plug for calcgpt

I got all the way down on my one knee and nothing short of the second coming is gonna move me from this spot

I feel like there’s a “law as it currently exists” thing versus the ideal. The law as it currently exists makes it illegal to discriminate based on content. This has historically been an important vector for, say, allowing civil rights activists to send essays to be published in newspapers. But much as it was illegal to deny a gay couple their marriage license, it ought be somehow made illegal to spread damaging lies about trans people in order to stir up a hate campaign.

In this case I’d say that 5 days fully paid suspension is probably an appropriate consequence for this rule-breaking, and could only be made more appropriate if it actually included tickets to spend those days someplace warmer and friendlier than that part of Canada and a knowing wink from the postmaster general.

I want to know when that report was filed. “I can’t find my cat, therefore my Haitian neighbors stole it to eat” is the kind of statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged, unless the idea was already in the water supply because a vice presidential candidate was saying it in interviews ahead of a national debate.

And those people are being told that the moderators were lugenpresse who were on the wrong side and want to protect criminals over your dog as part of their something something woke. The fact that the lamestream media keeps talking about how false it is and going to increasingly desperate lengths to deny it must mean we’re onto them.

This is how the propaganda works. This is such a blatant lie that it should be a simple fact-check, but since that doesn’t actually change anyone’s mind all the attempt does is keep everyone talking about immigration, an issue that fires up the right-wing base and exhausts a lot of their opponents. You’re absolutely right that we shouldn’t be still talking about whether this is true or not, but focusing on how weird and dumb this conspiracy theory is getting. That’s why the “weirdo” tack has been working for Harris in this campaign, and it’s unfortunate that the headlines have lost interest.

Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.

And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Actually one of the few political pressures Putin has had to deal with internally has been preventing conscripts from fighting outside of Russian territory, which has included not sending them into the supposedly-annexed oblasts in the east. They’ve had to make do with massive signing bonuses, prison recruitment, stop loss, and PMCs to make up the manpower shortage. Definitely some high-pressure tactics in use, but no actual use of legal force. Unless this video was taken on the Kursk front then any Russian soldiers who this was targeting had signed contracts that they could have chosen not to.

Speaking as the father of a 4-year-old girl, there definitely is. Not that I disagree in principle, it probably a bad example.

Sure, I’ll bite.

What part of doing that is mutually exclusive with voting for Harris against project 2025? I’m not going to pretend electoral politics should be the be-all end-all of political participation. Yes, you should organize locally and look for opportunities to support socialist policies and leaders, but given that none of those are on the ballot, you should still use what little power electoral politics give you to try and push the system away from right-wing lunatics who have been very explicit about their plans to make everything socialists complain about significantly worse and to corrupt the democratic systems to try and make it even harder for socialists to take power in the future.

What do you propose we do instead?

Would you believe that there’s a racist element to this as well?

So first off, Ukraine couldn’t have joined NATO because of the active territorial dispute re: Crimea, which had been ongoing since 2014. But more importantly, please for the love of God stop following the cold war colonial logic that only Great Powers have any agency in their own international affairs.

Poland, Lithuania, and all the rest of the countries that Putin wants out of NATO are in there because they wanted to be, mostly because they wanted security against Russian invasion. Like, Poland basically blackmailed President Clinton into expanding NATO by threatening to support the Republicans in the next election.

But why would anyone be worried about Russia invading them if they tried to exercise independent agency and leave Moscow 's sphere of influence? Oh wait, look at what’s happening in Ukraine. Maybe those fears weren’t so unfounded. Sweden and Finland certainly seem to think so, since the war led to the most significant expansion of NATO in decades and gave NATO a direct land border within spitting distance of Moscow.