🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦

But we have civil institutions in Europe that can be an vent for all of this aggression without causing bodily harm.

And how well are those working right now? How’s the resistance to spiralling authoritarianism going in France, in Germany, in most European countries? How are your institutional outlets holding up to Russian and American propaganda? Because I know here in Canada it sure isn’t sunshine and roses. Sometimes you have to remind the right wing that the system protects them, as much as it protects us so they quit undermining it.

I am sorry that you were indoctrinated to make it ok to kill random animals for your gain.

Not the point, but unless you’re a vegan, I’m just more honest about it. Also, the ritual isn’t about faith, it’s a frame of mind. The point of the story was that there is a whole world of difference between not caring about life, and accepting that life is messy and sometimes ugly and choosing to do the least harm for the greatest good is the kindest choice you can make.

My general point was that standing back and letting a little selective violence leak through can be enough to remind everyone what the stakes are, and can prevent a lot more violence down the road. Demonstrating that you aren’t so lost in bureaucracy that you’ve forgotten how to hit back quells a lot of ambitions and saves lives in the long run.

Very dumb… and unfortunately he’s not entirely wrong. Let’s just hope he’s wrong about how many people are that dumb, because the alternative is unpleasant.

I ultimately think your heart is in the right place, but your focus is misguided. It’s not pouring oil on the fire to recenter the conversation around the issue that is fuelling the rage. You’re not going to find much success appealing to the better angels of the corpos. They’ve made their decision. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, but the natural consequences of their inhumanity, is retribution in kind. Protecting them from the consequences of their own actions is as good as permission to escalate. I will mourn for those who are hurt in the crossfire, but they need to know where this ends and there’s no clearer way to remind them the cost of playing with fire than to let them get burned. I will not encourage violence, and I will continue to work to fix the problem by advocating for reasonable housing accommodations. But I’m not going to restrain those who have been pushed past their limits. The rights of free men and women are paid for in blood, and they always have been. I don’t have to like it. But not liking the price, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be paid.

When I was a boy, my grandfather taught me to hunt. When I took my first buck, there were tears streaming down my face. After the buck was dead, my grandfather didn’t yell at me for crying, he knelt down with me and he said a prayer of thanksgiving over it. He didn’t tell me to “man up and get over it”, he told me to never get comfortable with taking a life, any life. It might be necessary, that buck fed our family for months, at a time when meat from the grocer would have been too much of a luxury. But you should never let yourself get numb to what it cost, either the deer, or you. I don’t believe in gods or bibles these days. I still say a prayer after every kill, and it still hurts.

I won’t tell you to numb yourself to the cost. I won’t ask you to cheer for blood. I will ask you to look away and keep your eye on doing whatever you are able to make sure no one ever feels their only path forward is violence again. Understand what brought them to that point, cure the disease and let the symptoms run their course. Symptoms aren’t directly caused by the disease. They’re the body’s natural defences. Sometimes they will get carried away and you need to rein them in, but they serve a purpose.

Most of the French would certainly beg to differ on the matter of where to draw the line in the sand. If you’re waiting until you’re standing in rubble on the inside of a cage with guard towers to decide it’s time to act, you are not going to get very far. You may be willing to be a martyr, but lecturing everyone who isn’t is not productive. You want to prevent unnecessary loss of life, focus on curing the disease, not clutching your pearls about the symptoms. Spaniards do in fact have many political and diplomatic pathways to move forward. So use them and don’t worry about policing those who break ranks. You want to tell people you think violence is premature when the question is asked? That’s fine, but always bring your attention and others’ back to what brought someone to chose it in the first place, because no sane person chooses violence lightly and there’s only so many psychopaths on Earth (and we all know which side of this they tend to fall on).

While the system functions, those who act on their own will be dealt with according to the law, as they should be. Policing the tone of those who you otherwise stand with is a distraction that only serves to divide you. You can be on the team that that chooses peace, but it is absolutely not necessary to waste your time on respectability politics. The opposition certainly did don’t, and tying your own hands when they have already dropped the gloves serves no purpose.

In general, almost no one starts shooting without trying to talk first. The difference between you and the guy who is “rushing” to more extreme measures, is usually that their experience has left them far more cynical about the chances of talk achieving anything without actions to back it up. Every cynic is ultimately a disillusioned idealist who has seen too many failures of discourse to produce results. There’s a difference between a psychopath who engages in violence for the thrill of it, and someone who has reached the end of their patience while people die around them. There is no matter in which you are either the first or the last word on, and you are disrespecting everyone who has been in the fight for these causes before you could string two coherent words together. Today’s battles are just the latest front of a war that is older than living memory.

Throwing the “T” word around is just a rhetorical, thought terminating cliche at this point. When states are charging people with “Terrorism” for possessing reading material, that word has lost all meaning. Using the phrase “Department of War” is a terrorist act. The existence of a military and the implicit threat of force is a terrorist act. My breakfast preferences are almost certainly terrorism for some people. When everyone is a terrorist, no one is.

It’s good to highlight the efforts of some of the little keystones that are all too easily overlooked. The deeper you dig the more you realize there are more people silently doing their job that makes anything else we do on the internet even possible. Millions of people all over the world, invisible to you on a normal day, doing things you only have the vaguest awareness of making every moment of every day possible to begin with. Offline too if you want to get technical. The intricate web of civilization is humbling when you think about it.

Any movement that prefers shooting over talking has to be shunned from the start, because it will only beget more violence…

No, it doesn’t. Without them, your talk is just noise, easily dismissed. It’s absolutely necessary for some to follow their conscience and keep their hands clean, but if no one is getting their hands dirty then it doesn’t achieve anything.

All of your examples were on the side of “talking first”.

They were. But they always made sure to qualify their denouncements of violence with an understanding of the righteous rage of the more aggressive activities of the less restrained wing. Centre the motivations, not the actions.

“And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?" ~Martin Luther King Jr.

You represent one part of a bigger whole. Both parts are necessary. Neither by itself is sufficient.

Every successful movement has had two wings. A reasonable, non-violent, and thoughtful wing that offers peaceful solutions, and a militant wing that’s prepared to use less gentle means to demand change. Sin Fein would not have accomplished much without the IRA. Martin Luther King Jr. would have struggled to get concessions if Malcolm X and the Black Panthers didn’t exist. Mandela, Gandhi, all of them exist in juxtaposition with a less restrained movement that we tend to minimize in the history books, because the powers that be don’t approve of people knowing how the real sausage of political change works.

You want a peaceful resolution? Good! You are welcome and needed. But don’t disparage the radical wing. Understand they too want justice. They are a necessary part of the movement as well. They are the implicit “Or Else” at the end of every call for justice.

See that word “Editorials” in the link. That’s a dead give-away it’s not really a good source. While it’s a decent breakdown of the facts, the article doesn’t cite sources for its claims. As a statement of a position, its fine. It’s not evidence though, and evidence is what you need to debunk something. Experimental data, analysis, meta-analysis, something that you can point at that anyone with the right tools and resources can duplicate independently and get the same results, as well as a clear description of your reasoning for how it proves what you say it proves. That’s evidence.

The conclusion is correct, but it doesn’t show how someone can know that for sure. An opinion, by itself, doesn’t disprove anything. It amounts to “Trust me bro” which can be rhetorically compelling, but isn’t the same thing as being objectively correct.

“A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision” ~IBM Training Manual, 1979

So then how exactly would Oz be worse? If Fetterman can safely vote with Democrats, except when it really counts, knowing his vote doesn’t change anything at all, meanwhile getting a platform to slander and tarnish the whole democratic party with impunity, and even make headlines sending video love notes to the RNC while doing it, how is he materially worse than Oz? Oz literally could not do more damage to the country than Fetterman already is doing, and he couldn’t drag every Democrat in Congress through the mud with him while doing it.

You won’t reply because you can’t. There is no defense for his behaviour. Period.

How. Name one vote he made a difference on. Just one. I’ll wait.

Name one bill that Is would have changed the outcome on? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I’m sorry, no evidence except every word that comes out of his mouth.

Is it? Because they still haven’t passed or blocked anything meaningful. It’s really easy to “Vote with the party” when you know they’re going to lose regardless. Your metric may be true, but it’s ultimately meaningless.

There is a point at which the “best possible” is not sufficiently distinct from the worst possible that it becomes irrelevant for the individual in question. There was literally no benefit to Fetterman over Oz for most people. The only option was to work to make sure neither of them ever get another chance and to try to mitigate the harm that was going to be done when either one wins. I want to be clear, I don’t think this applies to the party as a whole but this is why (from the perspective of many) it does, because in their specific case the outcome is the same regardless. It’s a perfectly rational choice at the scale of the individual, because their interests, aren’t even on the ballot.

It would not have made a difference. It’s like asking if you’d rather face the firing squad or face the wall and get shot in the back. Same outcome regardless of “choice”, but by choosing Fetterman, the whole democratic party is weakened by the exercise.

Yeah, chips are more of a perishable good than any kind of durable infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the models themselves have no durable value because information is never truly scarce, regardless of how they try to make us pretend it is or poison the well with lies. There’s no magic solution to making LLMs actual AGI or even effective tools outside of their narrow scope. Not only that, the way they’re using it is extremely reckless, deeply inefficient, and supremely cost intensive, on a level that makes the Manhattan Project look wholesome. There isn’t going to be a “last man standing” to win, it’s just going to go up like flash powder and take everyone in the dogpile with it.

Seems reasonable to me. God knows no one in Pennsylvania has been any better off for voting John Fetterman. Play the game as best you can with the cards you have, and fold when that’s the right choice, and then work to make the game function better through organizing and other means.

If your religion requires you to hate and condemn and persecute others for their mere existence, for circumstances far from their control, for the who they love, what they look like, and where they came from, you worship evil, and no I will not support your right to harm others because it’s your “Faith.” And for those who think that’s persecution, good. Because bad ideas deserve to be persecuted. You don’t have to hold those beliefs. That’s a choice. If you value hate more than you love your neighbours, then you’ve made a choice. Make better choices.

And stop calling yourself a Christian. I may not believe in any mythology, but there’s nothing more disgusting than watching people twist old myths into an excuse for cruelty, and I don’t care if it’s Christian Extremists, Islamic Extremists, or Heathen Extremists pretending to worship Odin. Cosplaying a zealot is not exercising “Religious liberty”, you’re just a sadist whatever your rationalization is.