wemptronics
No bio...
User ID: 95
Is there really no recourse for this?
That depends. How much spare time do you have right now? One of the many structural problems Wikipedia has is their reliable sources policy. The way they've written it places all scholars and academics as the highest authorities for claims. Paper beats rock, decolonial cultural studies or not. The good news for you is that doesn't seem to be a serious issue on this article, as the 400 citations are mostly news sources which can be defeated with other news sources or, possibly, the same ones with a more neutral interpretation.
Your main problem is going to be that this is a protected article. Each change you want to propose is required to be a sentence for sentence replacement. After you submit it to the talk page, a person -- one who has decided this is what they want to do on Wikipedia -- will swoop in, read it for a few seconds, and say yes or no. That's another structural problem in Wikipedia: the people who choose to participate. Most likely you will need to claw, yell about policy, request other editors give a second opinion, re-submit a different version, and generally escalate it until you get your sentence replaced. You can then repeat this process to do the next sentence or small paragraph. So I ask again, how much spare time do you have?
Khamenei's article doesn't seem too bad by Wikipedia standards of bias, but it's there. Tracing Woodgrains wrote a good critique Mao's article last year to highlight its atrociously soft framing. I agree that when compared to Trump it's absurd, although that goes for a lot of articles on Wikipedia. I haven't checked,* but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that there's more Trump-related articles than any other president or living world leader. I suspect the great 20th century dictators have him beat, though I'm not very confident.
- "Stalin" is in 200 article titles, "Hitler" in 400 titles, and "Trump" is in 900. Not a great metric as many of those are family members or other famous Trump monikers, however there's tons of pseudonyms of Donald Trump, social media use by Donald Trump, and everything else people wanted to put in one article or another but were told no.
CJNG is a cartel which was run by a guy called "El Mencho". El Mencho was killed during an operation where Mexican authorities allegedly attempted to arrest him. They failed to arrest anyone, but did end up killing El Mencho and everyone else he was with. Which you might expect, because he doesn't seem like the taken alive type. Some might even say he was a pretty ruthless guy. When he was on the come up -- killing old guys, consolidating territory, and all the other cartel-like things -- he took a hard line against cops and slaughtered them in set piece ambushes on more than one occasion. That's probably harder for the state to forgive than the standard cartel doings, like dumping truck loads of rival bodies in some disputed city. It seems that once the boss man was killed orders went out to cause problems for the state for having the gall to do such a thing, so you have hundreds of roadblocks, burning cars, firefights, and so on.
I'm not sure there was widespread civil unrest? So many fires to put out at once does lead to some unrest. I think the worst of it was in their territory but a cartel needs and has a lot of dudes with guns. They retaliate against the state to remind them what misbehavior leads to. The state responds, brrrrrrrt.* Eventually some new guy takes the crown and it's back to business. Bygones and all that.
wemptronics
13d ago
Sam Kriss
Will check it out but prior note that I had fun reading his Clavicular looksmaxxing post a couple weeks ago.
How familiar are you with the case? Because it reads like a swinger presenting conman type succeeded in persuading a bunch of dumb low life deviants -- more likely to be rapists -- to entertain his own fetish. Some portion of them were fully cognizant of the situation, but others were too stupid to see the game or indeed convinced themselves their fantasy was real. A French retiree pimping his wife of 40 years without consequences. In other words you, a low life, congregate on Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum so you're very motivated to indulge in your preferred paraphilia. The number of men in the Wiki chart without prior criminal convictions is a minority.
If we restrict the circumstances to the worst aspects of the real crime as we see it, then I feel safe with an an estimate of <1% of men as likely to participate in it. If we ignore the substance abuse claims said to a judge we have: a child porn guy, sixteen prior convictions including child sexual assault guy, a repeat domestic violence offender, "eight prior convictions for theft" man, career drug dealer fled-to-Morocco guy, a previous inpatient at psych ward, and a one Mohamed Rafaa who had served time for raping his own daughter. What percentage of men are likely to do any of those things? There's an answer to some of your questions in the data of sexual offenders.
A couple do sound like average enough middle-aged men, but then I'm reminded these were late middle-aged men (old for rapists, statistically) found themselves guilty of rape after they trolled the Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum. I don't think there are any men in this case who were surprised when they discovered they were quite willing to engage in a criminal taboo. Bob, college student, who decides to have sex with Anne after a night out on the town because she said she would put out but fell asleep is something that sounds way more generalizable to me. Bob committed date rape, and I'd guess 5-15% of men are potentially like Bob. The complexity of consent is no stranger to this forum and few cases are as clear cut as sex with a drugged French retiree. Bob rarely finds himself popping into the bedroom of an old, sleeping French woman with her scumbag husband cheering him on with high-fives and assurances from the cuck chair.
Sex with an unconscious Scarlett Johansson lookalike does sounds like something with more potential popularity among men. An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?" My assumption is that sex with an unconscious stranger is (I imagine) categorically different than bad sex with a disinterested or bored woman no matter how attractive they are. (Can confirm.) So we're back to asking about general rates of sexual deviancy and willingness to act on that. Almost all men will have sex with women not fully interested in the sex, but <5% could shamelessly rape strangers to completion as unconscious sex doll objects without memory.
You know who I bet could answer your questions well? Aella.
I'm a huge fan of the hospitality and courtesy norms. It's just unfortunate it's just not a very good way to organize things at any macro level in the absence of a petrochemical lottery win.
I think we're being gracious by making sure no guest crosses the threshold without an offer of beverage. If I notice a confused looking tourist I'll try to make sure they're okay and know where to go. I feel good about myself when I do these things.
Here on the other side of the world dirt poor Afghans drop everything to treat a complete stranger to dinner, offer them a place to sleep, and make sure they have a ride to the other side of the country in the morning. They do all this even though they can't communicate with the stranger. It's a major reality check for any pride I have in so-called Southern hospitality. Maybe it's not a great way to organize society, but it's still impressive.
wemptronics
19d ago
Hah! I haven't gotten the impression he hates interacting with locals. He has a strong mind for independence, is somewhat guarded, but he must have higher openness than most to want to do what he does. His own personal hell is probably traveling to Hawaii or Prague with 3 other couples to bicker about the daily itinerary. Now that'd be fun.
Matt Lakeman is a blogger who reads books about a country, visits that country, and synthesizes this experience into a single article. He also has some type of crossover with SSC which might explain why his posts are memoir sized. The most recent post-Taliban Afghanistan travel post where he visits each provincial capital in Afghanistan I thought was fun. Fair warning, In This House Long Form Means Long Form. It is over 45,000 words, so clear your Sunday afternoon.
Lakeman writes throughout about the overwhelming positive attention, hospitality, and friendliness he received from local Afghans. He relays he wasn't bothered by most Taliban members he interacts with -- mostly they are bored security guards -- although notes at least one scary character. Norms of politeness, friendliness, generosity, and "sovereignty" are mentioned throughout the memoir. As I understand, he means sovereignty as shorthand for the likelihood of an individual of a culture to value a stranger's personal space, which Afghans most certainly do not. A real quagmire for nerdy travel bloggers! The positive attention he received was so great that Lakeman has dubbed Afghanistan the friendliest place on earth-- a title won from previous champ, Iraq.
Is this fun? Unsure, but I'm deleting all the other jibber jabber I wrote about it. General travel thread... and/or travel blog thread.
P.S. If you do read it consider evaluating this claim. "I think there is something to the idea that being – by Western standards – overly friendly and hospitable to strangers is indicative of a collectivistic and tribalistic mentality that in extremis leads to terrible conflict, often intranationally"
P.P.S. Bonus internet throwback Off-Road Trip Through the Democratic Republic of Congo series of forum posts circa 2010 (also long) This one is definitely fun.
"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.
Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.
Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.
In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) allocated $78 million dollars of its federal money towards competitive grants. That same year Mellon graciously funded $540 million in grants and fellowships. A historical look at NEH appropriation on the NEH website demonstrates the shrinking pie. A shrinking pie problem that is compounded by greater fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that contributed to fragmentation, and now, pain.
These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.
Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.
On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.
I can find no easy way to break down Mellon's grantmaking by interest or cause in the time it took to create an afternoon write-up. I can tell you that Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these proudly tells me that $934 million dollars went towards Gender Equality. Mellon's report seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.
An NYT comics guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique as well others that came before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.
I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:
Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.
The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.
No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they possible can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.
wemptronics
22d ago
Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback? Seems like a buyback should override any concern over details like what kind of weapon was used. But, the Canadian public may be more discerning than Americans on gun control. Here the type of weapon used is a tertiary consideration, at best. It's a gift to advocates if a shooter uses a scary gun, but none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber.
Republican president and Congress, foreign, Olympics taking up story time, not useful to Trump vs. Canada, and the shooter is not the favorite type. Could be a lots of these factors that influence coverage. I am most certain it has nothing to do with a newfound ethical backbone among journalists. Had the kid spray painted a swastika we'd hear about it. Another idea is there are no political interests positioned to feed a big gun control news cycle in the US, or a Canadian shooting may not be capable of setting that off. There's still time for stories of backlash and pouncing Republicans/Conservatives.
Seems like a fairly big story, anyway. CBC is willing to report this individual "started transitioning" four years ago in one of its last bullet points. I see /r/Canada issued an obligatory reminder to not spread hate or misinformation. It is important to be careful.
9 dead, 27 injured in a town of 2400. That's 1.5% of the population hit... incredibly grim.
wemptronics
24d ago
Veggie Tales is radical entertainment as far as Christian approved programming goes. Each episode has an abundance of musical numbers and relatable (to children) storytelling. That's pizazz... so long as we compare it to Davey and Goliath and not to the latest Incredibles feature.
wemptronics
25d ago
some dude on Reddit urging people to look up a Facebook reel
MODERATOR OF: /r/indonesian /r/BahasaIndonesia
The internet was a mistake.
This is me:
So I'm not beating up on a potential victim I'll pledge $100 to a Scottish youth charity that looks like it goes to underprivileged (white) Scots so long as we find reasonable suspicion the girl in the video is responding to immediate sexual advances by the man filming her. If there's no such of charity I'll ask locals decide where it should go.
Might have been a low bar, but I dare say I feel reasonably suspicious. If anyone can personally vouch for a Scottish charity that ticks the Scottish, youth (8-16), and/or underprivileged boxes I will likely take your suggestion. Otherwise it will be robot's choice after some vetting.
His co-accused Nadjedzha Belova, 20, is accused of repeatedly seizing and pulling another of the girls by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and punching her on the head to her injury.
That is outrageous. The presence of a woman reportedly behind the camera colored my judgment. It's not as if female accomplices are unable to help abduct girls, tolerate douchebag boyfriends, or assist in beating up pre-teens. It's just a less common combo.
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
I haven't seen deprogramming as I think you are suggesting for my entire adult life. The closest I've seen is a pause button that slows down the machine as it negotiates with the crisis producing organs. I don't think they're quite as pliable as you suggest, but I agree the people aren't the main issue.
The problem is we're left with a ruling class made up solely of people who are practiced in little else but our familiar little routines. The last vestiges of the adults in the room generation -- the ones who consciously decided to turn up the heat for worthwhile ends -- are dying off. Because of that, deprogramming is unlikely to come in return to normalcy form. If it does come, I expect it will be in a refreshing, possibly progressive or radical package. A breath of fresh air! I'll believe it when I see it.
The forever crisis has become too useful to too many. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs now benefit from if not rely on the arrangement. More importantly, so do many individual political careers. The end of democracy can't endure forever, yet I see no reason to believe why it can't endure the foreseeable future if we stay on an uncomfortable, but not-killing-each-other trajectory. At least Motte adjacent people somewhere will have a good hearty chuckle at the necessary rehabilitation of Trump, as to better contrast him against the next threat.
(which does not reveal to the volunteer jannies whether it's in the queue for AAQCs or negative reports or both)
A silly mod score doesn't memory hole an X times reported AAQC post or hide it from the editorial review process, I hope. Every time I've participated it hasn't been very difficult to tell what's in there for AAQC review. I've downgraded "High Quality" posts to "Good" in the janitor queue because of that. There are more than a few posts I'd like to see more of that are not at AAQC threshold, because it is its own special gold sticker.
Now that I know the volunteer janny institution has been captured via a Long March, I'll have to escalate my Affirmative Action charity upvotes to more subversive acts.
wemptronics
1mo ago
In Nice Facebook Group people may be more genuinely unsettled by factual explanations in a that's our preferred style of bot way. On reddit, bot or AI accusations are regularly and routinely used to derail discussion. A portion of it is bots, trolls, or propagandists of intent, but then a greater number are people who have observed this and get the same use out of the technique-- a handy way to route around any type of discussion. "Echo chamber" is an accurate description of this phenomena despite being so popular to be meaningless. Bots are bad>bots say bad>you say bad>you're a bad bot.
The blue area in my state never committed to any real sanctuary policies. The state has also made some decisions for them with regards to certain mandated cooperation which made it easier for blue politicians to ignore.
According to news reports, ICE stepped up operations in my state the first half of last year. That seems supported by a substantial increase of reported ICE arrests from 2024 to 2025.* According to social media ICE stepped up operations around the blue area in the last 6 weeks. I can't say by how much that is a real increase, because ICE watch styled posts aren't a reliable indicator. My state reports thousands of more deportation arrests in 2025 than the likely upper bound of 3000 that DHS claims for the surge in Minneapolis. I haven't diligently gone through that data, but I'd enjoy looking at man hours spent per arrest to compare. Mr. Vice President, do your thing.
Neither the task force styled Afghanistan metro surge or the sustained, but heightened enforcement efforts puts up the kinds of numbers that the hardliners say they really want. We're talking thousands to tens of thousands, not millions. With that taken into account the headline grabbing surge juice doesn't appear worth the squeeze. Whistle resistance isn't going to endure 3 years.
- Bonus uninformed speculation: based on the timing and sequence of the stories that do exist, it seems like increased efforts started on one side of the state and are sweeping to the other. Could just be me though.
I just looked and it wasn't hard to find dissenting voices from 2A advocates if that counts as right wing. James Reeves has a bunch of skeptical tweets, and he is one of the most famous industry personalities, a lawyer, and shitposter. He quotes Kostas Moros in a few of his shared posts who is a fierce 2A advocate. It's still all speculative, admittedly.
I'm not watching each and every video to inform my speculation. It doesn't look like an "execution" to me, but it does look like a bad shoot. What it looks like to me: police attempted to arrest a man and successfully disarmed him during his arrest. The presence of a weapon heightened alert of agents who, despite the number of men in arm's reach, did not coordinate well enough to restrain the individual. That failure allowed the man to squirm and contort enough to the moment where a cop blasts him. That cop will probably claim he saw him reach into his pants or whatever and he will probably be correct. Doesn't make it a good shoot.
Posting the Trumpian Letter to the Norwegian PM by itself doesn't qualify for a top-level alone. That would be no different than a Twitter repost which means you have to attach something to it. There may be other interesting things about the letter -- brevity, audacity, grammar -- but the wider context of threatening to invade Greenland does seem the most obvious place to go with a discussion.
I don't think you're expected to take anything as a given, but frequent contributors likely work through permutations and move on. Trump is one of the following: expert negotiator deal-maker, intentionally trolls for attention, or he candidly finds himself writing impromptu letters with no self-awareness of what they mean. Possibly one or all of these apply to the Trumpian antics on offer any given day. A Trumpian Letter to the Norwegian PM that opens with a mention of the Nobel prize in the midst of a peak Trump cycle is barely unexpected. I can only throw up my hands, yet again humbled by my own mundanity, and accept this force of nature for what it is. Just as I would accept a failed harvest, a bird pooping on my head, or any other act of God. The context of his actions is almost aways more novel and interesting than the routine.
You probably already know the one and only solution. More people should present their perspectives on stuff they are interested in. I sometimes notice the lack of perspectives or a topic and, if it looks like a slow week, I might do something about it. Top-levels have to meet a threshold, they do not need to beat the next guy or be long-winded. Consider this an endorsement from the common man.
A cop fires his weapon a few yards away and our camerawoman doesn't skip a beat. She barely steps away as shots are being fired, then chases down the moment to continue filming. That's experience and preparedness. Rather than hysterics it does feel measured. She's camerawoman protestor, she has a strong grasp on what that role entails, and she plays (non-derogatory) the role well. Her self eventually catches up, processes the experience, and the performance breaks.
A dramaturg is like a meta-director for theater productions. They don't direct a play from moment to moment nor are they in charge of part of the production like lights. The dramaturg fills a senior editorial role that considers the entire production. That includes the performance, a given audience and stage, and any thematic changes that come from those considerations.
Of course a social psychologist in the 50's learned about dramaturgs and decided this job was perfect for an explanatory framework of human behavior. As far as 20th century soft science goes it's not an unhelpful way to think about performance in our age. We film things in anticipation of an audience. This camerawoman, like most women under the age of 30, is closer to a professional than most 18thc. performers that came before her. She may have considered her audience and their expectations a thousand times in the last few years. You can find other ways to think about self and performance that include in dishonest or tactical terms. I don't think you'd be wrong in doing so, but it do be like that now. With the possible exception of turbo autists.
There is some footage of the immediate aftermath filmed by a local resident with the wife sitting on his front stoop. He fills a different kind of role as a cameraman-performer. He documents the overwhelming grief and pain seen minutes after the tragedy. There is no excessive gore or anything, but I wouldn't recommend anyone watch it. On the other hand you seem like the right kind of turbo autist so I'll share. This is "ICE shoots white lady in front of his house wtf" performance. Is it any more authentic? What about the wisecrack at 2:07? He's less dramatic and it drags a little, but he gets his lines in. I'm a believer.
That's the problem with having masked federal agents roaming the country shoving random people into the back of a van.
The nation could have functional normalized deportation enforcement. Cities could assist with ICE warrants just as they assist with other federal law enforcement. Cities might negotiate federal presence in specific areas or even coordinate arrests. If not oversight or assistance local police could bear witness as third parties more interested in the well-being of residents. Politicians could endorse organized protests while explicitly condemning vigilante efforts to interfere with federal law enforcement. These things could be done and relationships built while maintaining a meaningful opposition to Trump and ICE. There seem to be enough lawyers to obstruct 3 Trumps worth of deportation.
Alas, this is not the world we have built. Instead, we have sanctuary cities that have police forces forbidden from participating in this manner. We have politicians whose safest electoral option is to do nothing and order everyone else to do nothing. Except for the citizens who receive a fiery speech about invaders and the virtue of obstruction. All with a wink and a nod. The electorate responds, the inevitable occurs, and the winks and nods pays dividends in the form of a most exciting news story.
The more I see this play out the more I think this is the only way this was ever going to happen.
Yeah, I watched the conference. Arrest head of state, speak with his immediate successor, and stage a press conference to talk about the possibility of revitalizing its oil industry. This may be the extent of Trump running Venezuela. We'll see.
wemptronics
2mo ago
You and I both know Rep. Massie is furiously typing speeches as we speak.
Oil is mentioned a lot, but if I had to piece together a take it doesn't appear likely the US is currently "running" Venezuela and is not planning to run Venezuela. Not much mentioned is about politics at all, and if you're interested in building out industry you'd be interested in politics. "Democracy" didn't get a mention which might be a record for POTUS press conferences on foreign policy.
Trump directly answered one reporter who asked if he was working with opposition leader Machado. He called Machado a nice lady, but said he had not spoken to her and that she doesn't have the respect of the country to run it. That could be a calculated distance for coming political battles, but we don't do 4D chess, do we? Apparently he has spoken with now President Rodriguez.
Right now it looks the extent of running the country is getting the former and also current ruling party to say they'll be nicer. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years whatever US Oil project -- if there is actual follow through -- falls by the wayside. Based on what was said here I expect Venezuela to continue to be Chavistas-without-Maduro who maybe are more friendly to the US and probably still have a dilapidated oil industry. Opposition in Venezuela may take advantage of or otherwise earn more US interest and public support in coming weeks. Good luck to them.
There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back.
Ah-ha! I rambled on about something like this in a recent thread. In hindsight it was foolish of me to not consider the Skyrim modding scene was doing something, because of course they were. Thank you kind former lurker.
Link for me for later SkyrimNet does it all with an in-process DLL. Impressive.
I now realize I started to type too soon. This is a response to what I thought you wrote for a moment, but didn't really write. Posting anyway.
Does the UK right imagine themselves as patiently waiting, playing politics while the electorate learns the correct lessons? They don't give off an appearance of being that serious or prepared to me.
I know these polls are volatile -- more like (dis)approval polls of the current boss than anything else -- but stakes are potentially very high. "Treat all migrants as if they are citizens", enfranchise all residents with the right to vote, and accepting "responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move" are all things that would freak me out. If I read them on an official party platform and saw that party gain steam I'd think it's time to get serious about winning power. Among the numerous plans to stamp out out the last vestiges of industry and productivity there's also the casual pledges to do things like implement all "the reforms proposed" in a 2000 page report. This appears like a 15 year old legacy talking point, but it could also be the most popular pathway to smuggle in more media control.
I do not know too much about UK politics. There may be many good reasons to suspect the Greens will remain marginalized in politics and won't rub off on their failing Labour brethren-- at least not in consequential ways. If there's even a few reasons to take the rise of the Greens seriously, then the prospect of not-racist vote coalescing to empower the pack as many lefty gambits into platform, choose later party, even in limited form, that would scare the hell out of me. Expanding the franchise is already happening in a way that will favor whichever flavor of leftwardly one prefers. I wouldn't want to play chicken with any of this. Not unless I had immense trust in the system. That such a system would apply appropriate constraints until the voters are educated enough to reveal secret weapon Prime Minister Curtis Yarvin.
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