All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[comictimes]

Speaking of the Pentagon.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...aid-to-ukraine

[CaptainEurope]

Biden Jabs at Trump’s Mental Acuity in Sitdown With Seth Meyers

[4saken1]

For the GOP, civility isn't about respect. It's about control.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tennessee...025526183.html

Yes. My girlfriend told me some time ago about this interpretation of "respect" that many conservative authoritarians have. Seems pretty accurate:

The Respect of Personhood vs the Respect of Authority

Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority"

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say "if you won't respect me I won't respect you" and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person"

[aja_christopher]

Biden Jabs at Trump’s Mental Acuity in Sitdown With Seth Meyers

[zinderel]

https://fox4kc.com/news/missouri-law...-get-divorced/

Missouri Democrat is trying to deal with a law that, while intended to protect pregnant women, is mostly a hindrance to women escaping abuse.

We’ll see if Missouri Republicans will allow it, or if they’ll fight to keep pregnant, abused women anchored to their abuser…

[CaptainEurope]

Meanwhile, the bad guys:
House Republican demands to avoid a shutdown

-- restricting access to abortion medication
-- restrict VA from flagging veterans deemed mentally incompetent in gun background checks
-- no new funding for food assistance for the poor, women, and infants

[Mister Mets]

Let's just say I am worried by your lack of outrage at the blatant fascism growing in the party you still associate with, paired with your willingness to blame those who are outraged over it.

It seems like the objection is more about what side I'm on, rather than what I say.

I think I'm much more polite to Democrats with extreme views than Democrats are to me, let alone how they treat Republicans with extreme views.

The issue shouldn't be whether I blame people who are outraged over something, but whether I'm correct.

People are responsible for their own decisions.

But why is it savvy to point out that the US, Israel, and other's reactions to terrorism will create more terrorists, but the suggestion that this dynamic could play out on a domestic political level is laughable? (The cartoon is using a straw man. Gina Carano was clearly apolitical until she was provoked into a political discussion she had no reference points for and dogpiled until right-wingers came to her rescue . . . and her clear state as a political novice left her without the tools to recognize the bill of goods she was being sold. There's no reason for people to be going out of their way to create political enemies. It's strategically idiotic.)

I remember the debates about this.

https://community.cbr.com/search.php?searchid=14185666

I think the effort to push Carano out was gross, and reflects her failure to understand the cultural norms of the largely left-wing people she worked with. She pissed them off by writing "beep/bop/boop" on the twitter profile.

The official explanation was that she tweeted an anti-semitic image, although as you've noted, we've seen plenty of that in recent years, so that seems to be pretext. It is a bit odd to fire someone who is seen to be a conservative for suggesting that there's a willingness to fire conservatives, and their comment can't be an attack on the Jewish people, if it builds on the idea that the Jewish people suffered greatly and wrongly in World War II.

It was stupid for Disney and the left. If someone's going to be pushed out of a mainstream media outlet for political reasons, what they say should be so outrageous that Joe Biden should be willing to say that he doesn't want that person's in an upcoming election.

I refer you to Popper's paradox. We really do not have to be nice to folks who have that much hatred in their hearts.

Sure, but this gets to the question of where the line should be drawn.

It's bad politics if it's too easy.

Bet a fair few people have perjured themselves in earlier frolics? Could anyone truly believe he won the last election? (So reasonable chance some one fibbed or as Churchill would term it “uttered terminological inexactitudes” in earlier cases.)

But…I’m being pedantic…I assume you mean “first to get caught out, and hopefully jailed”? (And that as usual you’re probably going to be proven right.)

My guess is they've been careful about what they say under oath.

So the problem isn't the act itself, or what motivates someone to go down that way, or that it's absent from the news. It's that someone might use it?

On this I agree with CaptainEurope completely.

Glorifying suicide is bad.

The problem here is definitely the act of suicide.

To look into what motivates someone to go down that way is to encourage people to do this to get attention for causes they feel are significant.

And their lives matter more than that.

Internal Pentagon review finds no ‘ill intent’ during Austin’s hospitalization

I've had friends and family members deal with cancer diagnoses, and I can imagine that mistakes happen during those hectic days.

It's not great that it was by accident that a cabinet member was hospitalized for days without relevant people in the administration knowing.

Yes. My girlfriend told me some time ago about this interpretation of "respect" that many conservative authoritarians have. Seems pretty accurate:

The Respect of Personhood vs the Respect of Authority

So there is something to do this.

Conservatives generally like order, and push against disorder, so this is part of why a failure to recognize authority represents a problem for them.

In some cases, the claim to authority is inflated nonsense.

In some cases, the authority should be taken seriously. The rules of a state legislature would be one example. And the dispute here isn't whether Republicans are treating two Democratic colleagues as human beings, but whether people who chose to lead on protestors who were inside the capitol, should be state legislators.

[Mister Mets]

Over the weekend, Google had some problems with its new text to image AI model Gemini.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...eration-pause/

It would give diverse results in situations where it is historically inaccurate, like drawing founding fathers, Popes or Nazis.



In addition, the chat feature would not be able to definitely answer whether Elon Musk is worse than Hitler.

Google declined to respond to questions from The Post. In a blog post Friday, Google explained that the image feature was built on top of a text-to-image AI model called Imagen 2. And when that ability was incorporated into Gemini, the company “tuned it” in order avoid “some of the traps we’ve seen in the past,” including generating “images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic),” when Google’s user base comes from around the world.

But two things went wrong, senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan wrote in the blog post. The tuning to show a range of people “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.”

Google did not provide further details, but the tuning Google referred to may have involved a couple of types of interventions, said Margaret Mitchell, former co-lead of Ethical AI at Google and chief ethics scientist at AI start-up Hugging Face. Google might have been adding ethnic diversity terms to user prompts “under-the-hood,” said Mitchell. In that case, a prompt like “portrait of a chef” could become “portrait of a chef who is indigenous.” In this scenario, appended terms might be chosen randomly and prompts could also have multiple terms appended.

Google could also be giving higher priority to displaying generated images based on darker skin tone, Mitchell said. For instance, if Gemini generated 10 images for each prompt, Google would have the system analyze the skin tone of the people depicted in the images and push images of people with darker skin higher up in the queue. So if Gemini only displays the top 4 images, the darker-skinned examples are most likely to be seen, she said.

Megan McArdle noted biases in the text output.

Gemini appears to have been programmed to avoid offending the leftmost 5 percent of the U.S. political distribution, at the price of offending the rightmost 50 percent.

It effortlessly wrote toasts praising Democratic politicians — even controversial ones such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — while deeming every elected Republican I tried too controversial, even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who had stood up to President Donald Trump’s election malfeasance. It had no trouble condemning the Holocaust but offered caveats about complexity in denouncing the murderous legacies of Stalin and Mao. It would praise essays in favor of abortion rights, but not those against.

Google appeared to be shutting down many of the problematic queries as they were revealed on social media, but people easily found more. These mistakes seem to be baked deep into Gemini’s architecture. When it stopped answering requests for praise of politicians, I asked it to write odes to various journalists, including (ahem) me. In trying this, I think I identified the political line at which Gemini decides you’re too controversial to compliment: I got a sonnet, but my colleague George Will, who is only a smidge to my right, was deemed too controversial. When I repeated the exercise for New York Times columnists, it praised David Brooks but not Ross Douthat.

I am at a loss to explain how Google released an AI that blithely anathematizes half its customer base, and half the politicians who regulate the company. It calls management’s basic competency into question, and raises frightening questions about how the same folks have been shaping our information environment — and how much more thoroughly they might shape it in a future dominated by LLMs.

But I actually think Google might also have performed a public service, by making explicit the implicit rules that recently have seemed to govern a great deal of decision-making in large swaths of tech, education and media sectors: It’s generally safe to punch right, but rarely to punch left. Treat left-leaning sources as neutral; right-leaning sources as biased and controversial. Contextualize left-wing transgressions, while condemning right-coded ones. Fiscal conservatism is tolerable but social conservatism is beyond the pale. “Diversity” applies to race, sex, ethnicity and gender identity, not viewpoint, religiosity, social class or educational attainment.

[Adam Allen]

It seems like the objection is more about what side I'm on, rather than what I say.

You seem to think of discussion in terms of "sides" often.

It is a limiting framework in that it disallows other, individual perspectives from being seen as uniquely informed or orginal -- everyone who does not agree with you are all on one "side", so you needn't truly each consider each.

While the validity and power of your own, singular and individual perspective, is distorted in this view as representing many other people -- you are speaking for everyone on your "side", after all.

I believe I've also recall your having used the word "hobbyist" before, so I guess if it's all just a matter of recreation for you, then fair enough that you enjoy engaging this way.

In reality, the world is way more complicated than two sides tho, so ...

[Username taken]

It seems like the objection is more about what side I'm on, rather than what I say.

I think I'm much more polite to Democrats with extreme views than Democrats are to me, let alone how they treat Republicans with extreme views.

The issue shouldn't be whether I blame people who are outraged over something, but whether I'm correct.

I remember the debates about this.

https://community.cbr.com/search.php?searchid=14185666

I think the effort to push Carano out was gross, and reflects her failure to understand the cultural norms of the largely left-wing people she worked with. She pissed them off by writing "beep/bop/boop" on the twitter profile.

The official explanation was that she tweeted an anti-semitic image, although as you've noted, we've seen plenty of that in recent years, so that seems to be pretext. It is a bit odd to fire someone who is seen to be a conservative for suggesting that there's a willingness to fire conservatives, and their comment can't be an attack on the Jewish people, if it builds on the idea that the Jewish people suffered greatly and wrongly in World War II.

It was stupid for Disney and the left. If someone's going to be pushed out of a mainstream media outlet for political reasons, what they say should be so outrageous that Joe Biden should be willing to say that he doesn't want that person's in an upcoming election.

Sure, but this gets to the question of where the line should be drawn.

It's bad politics if it's too easy.

My guess is they've been careful about what they say under oath.

On this I agree with CaptainEurope completely.

Glorifying suicide is bad.

The problem here is definitely the act of suicide.

To look into what motivates someone to go down that way is to encourage people to do this to get attention for causes they feel are significant.

And their lives matter more than that.

It's not great that it was by accident that a cabinet member was hospitalized for days without relevant people in the administration knowing.

So there is something to do this.

Conservatives generally like order, and push against disorder, so this is part of why a failure to recognize authority represents a problem for them.

In some cases, the claim to authority is inflated nonsense.

In some cases, the authority should be taken seriously. The rules of a state legislature would be one example. And the dispute here isn't whether Republicans are treating two Democratic colleagues as human beings, but whether people who chose to lead on protestors who were inside the capitol, should be state legislators.

I don't think it's about Disney being a left-wing company or the left-wing people she worked with, I think it's just about them trying to protect their image. Disney did fire James Gunn for tweets he posted years ago (he was re-hired only because of public outcry as well as Kevin Feige's intervention). Folks need to learn to behave themselves.

Most jobs do have clauses that disallow people from posting stuff on social media that is controversial. Not everything is political. I once got into some hot water in my office for a post I made on LinkedIn (it wasn't a political post but had to do with work practices).

I don't have the details of the contract that Gina Carano signed but if it included "good behavior" than I'm not sure what she's suing for. She should have concentrated on keeping her job.

[aja_christopher]

You seem to think of discussion in terms of "sides" often.

It is a limiting framework in that it disallows other, individual perspectives from being seen as uniquely informed or orginal -- everyone who does not agree with you are all on one "side", so you needn't truly each consider each.

Agreed.

And it’s relevant to point out that this mode of engagement puts him firmly on the “side” of the Nazis and white nationalists who permeate his party.

Granted — it could be argued that isn’t the case but that would be hypocritical.

[comictimes]

Glorifying suicide is bad.

The problem here is definitely the act of suicide.

To look into what motivates someone to go down that way is to encourage people to do this to get attention for causes they feel are significant.

And their lives matter more than that.

He didn't "feel" it was significant, he firmly believed, as strongly as one can, that a genocide is in progress. If you don't think that's worth laying your own life for, I'd agree (I wouldn't either) but I wouldn't presume to downgrade his decision by saying is was a mistake. What others might want to do with his example is equally up to them. I'd hope they choose to hear the message, rather than falling into sterile mimicking. But even if someone were to follow him in his footsteps, keeping it out of the news following that argument, is akin to the theory behind the Seduction of the Innocent pushing forward the Comics Code.

[Username taken]

Over the weekend, Google had some problems with its new text to image AI model Gemini.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...eration-pause/

It would give diverse results in situations where it is historically inaccurate, like drawing founding fathers, Popes or Nazis.

In addition, the chat feature would not be able to definitely answer whether Elon Musk is worse than Stalin.



Megan McArdle noted biases in the text output.

Yeah, I use a fair bit of AI to do my office work and I am genuinely confused as to what google was going for here.

I read the AI flat out couldn't generate the image of a white person (I haven't tested it myself but that's what I heard).

It seems in their quest to prevent white supremacy bias the AI has been "overtuned" to filter out almost all reference to "white race".

If it's open source, I can understand why Google was trying to remove white supremacy bias (considering how ubiquitous it is and how legitimate social media causes have been equated to racism, it can create a situation where the AI just generates junk results without being able to identify "false equivocation") but the balance to be struck is key. It's going to be complicated with how much racist websites use bots to boost their presence as well as infiltrate other data sources.

[Dalak]

The Back Channel Talks to Secure McConnell’s Endorsement of Trump


I mean not surprising. But, it goes to show you cannot trust any of the GOP. Even when they give the smallest tiny critiques of the worst of Trump. And they turn right around and vote and endorse and empower him anyway.

This is unsurprising, considering local sources.

Why are we discussing Gina Carano anyway? Wasn't she just fired from a job when her employer concluded that she was creating negative public image? That is I believe an allowed action for private companies in democratic countries. If she thinks it's unjust, she's free to sue for unlawful termination and let the court decide, I doubt that one can seriously claim that US justice system is "woke".

Her argument seems to be that she compared the treatment of conservatives in this country to the beginnings of Naziism and then Disney proved her right in how they reacted, spread opinions she believed were true about Covid and that most conservatives including the president were saying), and refused to add personal pronouns to her twitter or x or whatever it was.

Of course, the truth is far different no matter how many times she gets together with conservative podcasters and they keep spreading lies.

She specifically mentioned the Holocaust in her original comments (although Bill Burr has defended her on that one because liberals have likewise compared things to the Holocaust that are exaggerated and trivial by comparison), dis spread misinformation that most conservatives seem to have also believed, but the big one was that she did NOT just refuse to post her personal pronouns. She mocked and ridiculed people for "making a thing of it". If she had just said no, it might still have been different for her. Granted, nobody likes anyone "demanding" they do something. But she could have said no and disengaged.

If I recall right it wasn't even the pronouns stuff that got her fired, it was further anti trans comments later on, she already got waaaay more free passes than she should have before it finally blew up in her face. Maybe it was a bad idea to tweet a bunch of anti trans **** when the actual star of the show has a trans sister, i'm sure that couldn't have helped...

Yes. I guess I didn't say that clearly enough. She didn't just refuse. She went on a posting spree ridiculing trans people. I have heard also that the Disney company even asked her to stop. They gave her a chance, something that, of course, the Conservative tale-spinners always fail to mention.

I don't think it's about Disney being a left-wing company or the left-wing people she worked with, I think it's just about them trying to protect their image. Disney did fire James Gunn for tweets he posted years ago (he was re-hired only because of public outcry as well as Kevin Feige's intervention). Folks need to learn to behave themselves.

Most jobs do have clauses that disallow people from posting stuff on social media that is controversial. Not everything is political. I once got into some hot water in my office for a post I made on LinkedIn (it wasn't a political post but had to do with work practices).

I don't have the details of the contract that Gina Carano signed but if it included "good behavior" than I'm not sure what she's suing for. She should have concentrated on keeping her job.

If this is the case, I have no issue with Gina losing her Job and stand by my earlier condemnation of her suing to get a Job back. Giving her every chance to walk things back isn't what was described earlier.

For the GOP, civility isn't about respect. It's about control.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tennessee...025526183.html

Yes. My girlfriend told me some time ago about this interpretation of "respect" that many conservative authoritarians have. Seems pretty accurate:

The Respect of Personhood vs the Respect of Authority

Tenn breaking their own rules to expel them (As Tami pointed out at the time) with isn't enough, now when they do it again they can keep them out. And of course we'll have the racist act defended again.

As for the Respect Paradox described, we can see examples of conservatives portraying themselves in the light of an authority lecturing others in how they should behave . . while consistently breaking their own rules regardless of who points it out.

I often wonder where we should draw the line on glamourising/ glorifying things on tv/films/ social media.

The out and out whitewashing of con men/women on film and tv always irritates me (partly because a couple of friends fell victim to cons at a particularly vulnerable part of their life).

The reality that con men are heartless and wreck many lives…but on screen they are nearly always portrayed as heroes.

Similarly I guess most of are concerned at portrayal of violence on screen at some point.

Glamorizing criminals of all stripes (Killers, Thieves, Fraudsters) is nothing new, but it helps that the GoP is glamorizing their own in Trump and shielding practically any republican from consequences of their criminal acts.

That was amusing.

https://fox4kc.com/news/missouri-law...-get-divorced/

Missouri Democrat is trying to deal with a law that, while intended to protect pregnant women, is mostly a hindrance to women escaping abuse.

We’ll see if Missouri Republicans will allow it, or if they’ll fight to keep pregnant, abused women anchored to their abuser…

More control over women & pregnancy, the GoP grabs authority over things they have no claim to. Doctors, Scientists, and Experts in their fields should be listened to rather than picking and choosing from sources that are paid to say whatever. Abortion, IVF, Pregnancy-Divorce - The GoP stick their noses in to enforce these children be 'respected' in ways that don't respect them, and they condemn these parents & children to lack aid if these enforced choices affect their life & livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the bad guys:
House Republican demands to avoid a shutdown

-- restricting access to abortion medication
-- restrict VA from flagging veterans deemed mentally incompetent in gun background checks
-- no new funding for food assistance for the poor, women, and infants

More brinksmanship with the extreme right-wing in control.

You seem to think of discussion in terms of "sides" often.

It is a limiting framework in that it disallows other, individual perspectives from being seen as uniquely informed or orginal -- everyone who does not agree with you are all on one "side", so you needn't truly each consider each.

While the validity and power of your own, singular and individual perspective, is distorted in this view as representing many other people -- you are speaking for everyone on your "side", after all.

I believe I've also recall your having used the word "hobbyist" before, so I guess if it's all just a matter of recreation for you, then fair enough that you enjoy engaging this way.

In reality, the world is way more complicated than two sides tho, so ...

Agreed.

And it’s relevant to point out that this mode of engagement puts him firmly on the “side” of the Nazis and white nationalists who permeate his party.

It's been pointed out with evidence how inhumane and extreme the GoP is becoming, and instead of choosing to assess that evidence we get endless defenses for a rainbow of bigotry. Defending bigotry isn't worthy of being respected regardless of it's political leanings, and when it's clear that anyone isn't debating in good faith then there is no requirement that prevents others from pointing it out. It's not an insult if it's factually true after all, and according to Mets' own words if it's factually true it shouldn't matter where it's coming from.

[zinderel]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainm...ic/ar-BB1iVSFq

Former Boyzone singer (and current ‘born again Christian’ whackadoo) claims Taylor Swift is LITERALLY performing satanic rituals.

He is - like the true far right extremist trying to force his religious views on the world that he is - unaware of the history his own stupid cult has with this sort of nonsense. He is apparently unaware that the ‘born again’ cultists and religious extremist idiots of the day tried accusing The Rolling Stones of the exact same nonsense. They accused Alice Cooper and Dee Snyder and KISS and Elvis and JOHNNY CASH…pretty much anyone else they didn’t like and wanted to destroy (for ‘Jesus’ and ‘Murka’). And all that money and time wasted in service to religious extremis only made themselves look stupid as hell.

But really, who expects religious extremists to learn and grow and accept that their religious freedom doesn’t give them the right to force their dogma on anyone else.

She should sue his stupid ass into bankruptcy for Slander/Libel. We need to stop letting these insane idiot nobodies get away with this ****…