> The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.
This statement is one of those useless exercises in pedantry like when people say "well technically coffee is a drug too, so..."
Code with publicly-known weaknesses poses exponentially more danger than code with unknown weaknesses.
It's like telling sysadmins to not waste time installing security patches because there are likely still vulnerabilities in the application. Great way to get n-day'd into a ransomware payment.
Have you spent time reviewing the security patches for any nontrivial application recently? 90% of them are worthless, the 10% that are actually useful are pretty easy to spot. It's not as big of a deal as people would like to have you think.
This metaphor drops some pretty key definitional context. If the common belief prior to this race was that cars could not beat horses, maybe someday but not today, then the article is completely reasonable, even warranted.
Should Fox, Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones, Tucker, Bannon, the deputy director the the FBI (in a prior gig, to be fair), the president of the United States (current & prior gigs), members of congress, MAGA influencers like Tim Pool, the company paying Tim Pool, the people paying the company that pays Tim Pool, etc, etc, etc, and etc, be allowed to?
It's well-accepted that Stalin's various purges and famines killed several times more civilians than Hitler managed to, for instance.
Here in the US, I'm personally more concerned about a replay of Pol Pot's regime. He took Hitler's warped notions of anti-intellectualism ("Jewish physics") to a whole new level ("Kill anybody wearing glasses.")
The fact that he did so under the standard of leftism doesn't really seem that meaningful or relevant, because if/when it happens here, it will evidently be perpetrated by the extreme right. A pox on both their houses.
Consider the space of possible paths towards peace in UA that the current administration can choose from. Do you believe the paths with the highest likelihood of success for reaching a mutual peace agreement involve making one of the sides unhappy, uncomfortable, angry, or by publicly berating them?
It is true that he doesn’t care if people are unhappy or uncomfortable, it’s true he doesn’t care about optics, it is true that he has a set of things he wants to get done, and it’s true the first two points influence his approach to achieving the latter. However the question - the only question that matters - still remains: is this approach the most effective course of action to choose? Maybe it’s not reasonable to assert with complete confidence that it isn’t, but it is certainly unreasonable to assert that it is.
Out of curiosity, what are the other similar public meetings/negotiations you’re aware of that were conducted in a similar way?
Or generally, since you say this did not deviate from your expectations, what are the past events that influenced your baseline expectation for conduct on the geopolitical stage?
Civility is overrated. Maybe you felt like tired rhetoric from prior admin about Israel or Putin was more effective but I sure don't. People are awfully afraid to rock the boat in American political discourse. It's probably been too polite as a cover for a lot of ugly policy on both the left and right.
Perhaps, and the externalities often unaccounted for or hand-waved away.
Even the US Government is getting involved in subsidizing these companies and all of the infrastructure and resources needed to keep it expanding. We can look forward to even more methane power plants, more drilling, more fracking, more noisy data-centres sucking up fresh water from local reserves and increased damage to the environment that will come out of the pocket books of... ?
Update: And for what? "Deep Research"? Apparently it's not that great or world-changing for the costs involved. It seems that the author is tired of the yearly promise that everything is just a year or two away as long as we keep shovelling more money and resources into the furnace.
What is the current state of DSPy optimizers? When I originally checked it out it appeared to just be optimizing the set of examples used for n-shot prompting.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.