F
I think talking now about what will be required to clean things up is helpful. Setting expectations.
This won't be easy, powerful and wealthy people have way of closing ranks that I didn't really appreciate until recently.
This is part of why I think the Epstein files remain important. There is a broad understanding of what that represents.
Only 15 percent of the public are "happy" with how the files have been released.
"Probably a harder fight than crushing the fash, tbh."
We know this and go in ready for the BS this time.
This is a lesson. We are supposed to learn to walk by and not take a video or ask a question when we see a bunch of guys pile out of a van and grab someone.
If only these horrible agitators and politicians and media would stop confusing the public. We might realize that although it might "look bad" that they have snatched a crying child, in reality it's all for our own good.
How simple do they think we are?
If you try to help the wrong person. If you are in the wrong place. If you have the wrong opinions?
You might get shot shot dead. Ms. Noem thinks that's all on you.
This we are told is the price of... of freedom?
That can't be right, can it?
Maybe it is the price of ... safety? Safety from what?
ICE is the most terrifying things on the streets of our cities. If you see them beating a woman you better not help. So they say.
The public backlash is so vast no one is buys "it's paid agitators" anymore.
Noem and Bovino are desperate that the people who have supported and trusted them and Trump do not look more closely at what ICE is really doing.
At the same time they continue to kill, to scare us into stopping.
I'm hopeful that this will fail.
This is a big crack. This "they are well meaning people who have been fooled" line. 3/3
I really wish that were the case as it would imply leadership from some of the more powerful Democrats that has been far too absent.
Of course it has worked in exactly the opposite way. People see what ICE is doing and we have pressured and twisted the arms of Democrats until they have started to take it seriously.
But I find it interesting that this is their line of defense. "The protestors are confused, and this gets them killed"
As if ICE were the weather. 2/
Kristi Noem, US Secretary of Homeland Security, and Gregory Bovino long time "senior official" in the US Border Patrol, who seems to have no further formal title despite being a high profile spokesman have both said that "politicians and media" have confused, us, the public about what ICE is really doing.
When they aren't calling protestors "paid agitators" they insist that we have been mislead by "democrats" to think that ICE is out of control.
1/
You may have seen the story about the journalist who was hired by ICE despite failing a drug test.
Here is an interview with Laura Jedeed who went to an ICE job expo, filled out the forms and discovered a disturbing level of desperation in the ICE hiring process. It's not "as bad as you think" ... it is worse.
I've never watched this youTube channel "What A Day" before but it seems interesting. Is anyone familiar with it?
I think it's good to not get stuck using one comparison over and over, or to flatten historical events so that they become a shorthand for more complex ideas.
And I agree with the point that in the US we often look to WW2 when we could find examples in our own history that are more salient.
Is Bing in the center of the top row?
Pica has a very expressive face. And she has a lot of emotions and ideas that she wants YOU to know about.
I'm biased but I think she's exceptional even among cats in this. But, anyone can prove me wrong by posting photos of all of the funny faces your cat makes. (could this be a ploy to get more cat photos? oh no no no never )
Someone should tell him it's much more classy and powerful to call them "ministries" not "boards" boards are for corporations with their board meetings.
Give us the "Ministry of Peace" and the "Ministry of Truth"
I think most Americans would like the first logo more, unfortunately. The projection in the UN logo is an unfamiliar one and I would not be shocked if Trump and his associates struggled to understand what it was. Or felt annoyed by how such a projection forces you to think for a moment.
The BOP logo runs to the other extreme. And this requires intentional not just incidental myopia.
My home country is acting like a jackass in more overt ways than ever.
Trump has tried to create a replacement for the UN. The only countries who have joined are smaller countries who felt like they couldn't say "no" to Trump in this moment due to US military and economic power. The logo is a big embarrassment. It explains everything. Here is the BOP's logo next to the UN's logo.
The UN's logo tries to downplay the centering of US power and European power. Board of Peace has no pretense of egalitarianism.
These AI as equity arguments aren't coming from people who have ever said anything about "equity" before this moment, and they will never say anything about equity after this moment. They don't really care about equity. They just want to have something to say that might pause our criticism.
"What if it really could help people?"
Let that go. If it could help people you'd see people using AI effectively to help people.
They are using it as cover.
3/3
I heard a guy say AI could "make art more diverse" and he had all these images of black elves and dwarfs. As if "lacking diversity" were just a surface issue not one built into who gets to participate, who has the time for creative expression.
As if just pasting in a different colored face were the same thing as having an artist who wanted to draw that diversity and whose work would emerge from and improved by the culture and experiences of the creator.
2/
It's also condescending, insulting, to disabled people to suggest that if some of them, IDK, struggle with a paint brush what is needed is for the computer to draw it for them rather than for all of us to look and listen with more care to the work that they create.
1/
Yes, it was this thing we did in Girl Scouts where we'd send a post card to a kind somewhere else in the wold and they'd write us by.
My postcard buddy never even sent me the first card back and she gets a whole Canadian boyfriend out of it? In just two years?
1. The largest ant to ever walk the earth (that we know of) is the extinct species known as "Titanomyrma" The fossilized queens of this species were about the size of hummingbirds.
2. Carpenter ants sleep in a cuddle pile inside of their homes in rotting logs, like puppies.
3. Camponotus rectangularis is a carpenter ant with a wide head and simple black eyes. She gets her second name from her rectangle-shaped thorax.
4. The oldest verified ant queen lived over three decades.