There has to be an armed conflict between two or more nations. Otherwise they’re “just” crimes.

Can it be a war crime if you’re not actually at war? Seems like it’s just murder.

That’s an excellent point! You’re right that you don’t need 500 word blurb to fill the void with. Would you like me to explain more about mass data guzzling? Or is there something else I can help you with?

Are people undergoing mental health crises known for always making good, rational decisions?

Yeah, that’s the significant thing for me here. Not what’s being said, but which paper is saying it.

I use Perplexity for most of my searches. Not because of ads (I have robust adblocking to the point that I’m genuinely gobsmacked whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t browse any other way, like on someone else’s machine), but because of third-party SEO and first-party paid-for search results. Perplexity is far from flawless, but unlike google, Bing, etc. and the engines which rely on them (DuckDuckGo is Bing, for example), it’s actually designed to return you the answer to your question.

We can discuss the exact meaning of “ads” and whether the paid-for search results count. I’d say they’re similar but with subtle differences. And it’s not what’s being suggested for ChatGPT here, although for over a year now I’ve been suggesting that the AI-equivalent of SEO & paid-for search results is where we’re headed.

I’m sure I’ve heard this song before. These kinds of stories can make people think “well, that’s okay then” and not vote when the time comes.

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Here’s the thing - the protections are good. If the Justice Department weren’t compromised and the President wasn’t one of the people in the files, they would be exactly the protections which make sense. You don’t want child porn released. You don’t want the names of the victims released. You don’t want information released if it will harm the chances of prosecuting a paedophile. You don’t want information released if it will make citizens significantly less safe.

If we could trust the President and the Justice Department, these rules would be exactly what we want.

He called for them to be executed. Let’s not soft-pedal this.

Where’s that cartoon about financial news stories making much more sense if you replace the words “the economy” with “rich people’s boat money”?

The shocking thing here is not that there are MAGA accounts from outside the US, but that twitter introduced a feature which would expose that

Okay, so firstly, they start talking about “Western media”, and then only talk about US media.

It’s characterisation of the media as state media is simplistic and misses the headline - the outside influence the media has on the state. Rupert Murdoch explicitly said that he got involved with the media in the US and UK in order to influence politics. There are any number of examples of something being featured on Fox News and Trump talking about it the next day.

Here in the UK the Labour government just announced their new immigration policy. Its biggest aim is to stop people crossing the channel in small boats. The biggest opposition party, Reform’s entire platform is based around stopping small boats. The previous government’s immigration policy for more than a decade was based around stopping small boats.

Illegal immigration is a tiny fraction of immigration. People entering the country in small boats is a tiny fraction of illegal immigration. And illegal immigration itself is overcounted because there are currently no legal routes into the country for asylum seekers, making all asylum seekers illegal immigrants by definition.

So, why have politicians been forming their policy around this one inconsequential issue rather than trying to form more meaningful and effective policy? Because the front pages of the daily newspapers have had small boat stories for years. It’s deliberately been turned into an issue by the press, which has forced politicians to look like they are “doing something”.

The traffic between media and politics isn’t just one way, of course, but it’s a lot more reciprocal and complex than this empty ideological rant would have you believe. And it’s probably fair to say that the press has more influence over the state than the state has over the press, at least in the UK.

Tony Blair, for example, purposefully spent time wooing Murdoch because he knew he couldn’t get elected as Prime Minister without The Sun on side.

It’s ironic that this piece about the lies of the media is itself rather devoid of accurate reporting and is instead knowingly or unknowingly full of falsehoods in order to ideologically persuade its readers.

Autism is a spectrum, literally all of us are on it. That’s literally what a spectrum is in a psychological context. Everyone is “on the spectrum” that’s what makes it a spectrum.

I’m not going to claim that you don’t have the qualifications or experience you claim to have, but autism clearly isn’t your field of expertise. Autism isn’t called a spectrum because everybody is on it. It’s because it presents very differently in different people and there are a wide variety of traits only a few of which may be shared by any two autistic individuals.

The diagnostic criteria quite explicitly compare and contrast the traits of autistic people with the traits of allistic people, and the impairment is categorised by levels, 1, 2, or 3.

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According to AOC she wanted to do a senate run and Trump wouldn’t let her, hence the scorched Earth

WRT 3 don’t forget the US flag being lowered into shot on a crane as the photographers were being ushered in. I’m also not a conspiracy theorist, but either a lot of people did a lot of thinking really quickly, or there’s something fishy about it all.

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Hatsune Miku has been putting on live performances for decades. There’s no reason at all why an AI-generated musical act couldn’t too.

I’m pretty sure he could grope children on live tv and his base would still find a way around it.

I mean, there’s that photo of a 13 year-old Ivanka sitting on his lap at a gig.