JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Yes, it's leading on, of course, but that's a cornerstone of advertising industry. Like they show a guy drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK and then beautiful lightly dressed ladies surround him adoringly. The implication is clearly that the same would happen to you if you start drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK even though it's clearly a lie. But it's a lie within socially accepted boundaries.
JarJarJedi
8hr ago
"Running Wikipedia" is a very nebulous term. You can take it in a very restrictive sense - paying for hardware, bandwidth and maintenance for the skeleton crew necessary so that the site remains on air. Then indeed, most of the donations do not pay for that. If, however, you allow development of new software and new modes - there are many more wikis beyond Wikipedia, though most are not as well known, but they exist and have their own audience, such as Wikidata, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and many others - then the donations would cover a significant part of this already. If you add some grants that are aimed at improving wiki content - such as paying people for writing software or articles for the benefit of Wikipedia - then you cover the substantial bulk of the expenses. Sure, some of these grants would have very woke tint - e.g. specifically concentrating on some woke selection or aspect and serving specific woke audience - but you can not say these grants are fraudulent and a private foundation has the right to be woke and finance woke grants. While for a federal government distributing tax money the equanimity and absence of any discrimination must be a requirement, for a private entity it is not possible to ask for that, and if they do choose to prefer woke causes, it is not a crime.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, the fundraising banners don't even claim these donations are necessary to run Wikipedia (indeed, they are not for many years now, though once they used to be, Tides foundation's support ensures Wikipedia can survive financially without any additional donations, if necessary, even though at the cost of freezing a lot of projects) - see the example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2025_banners#%22Current_best%22_banner_as_of_July It just says, roughly, "Wikipedia is cool, please give us a little money". It does not make any claim about necessity of the donation or where that donation would go.
JarJarJedi
10hr ago
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"?
You certainly can inform anybody on anything. Like, if you know something, you can tell that to somebody else. If you signed an NDA, the NDA owner could sue you for that, even in that case it will be a civil matter. I do not see any criminal statute that could stop you from disclosing anything you know to anybody, short of national security secrets and such. So yes, you can collect "dossiers" on other people, that's just information. You can not become "private police" unless you are also granted enforcement powers - i.e. powers to arrest, deprive of liberty, confiscate property, etc. Some activities are regulated e.g. via private investigator licenses, but frankly I don't see any principled reason to do so, it's more like dog grooming licenses - some people think it'll improve the quality of services to require people providing the services to jump through some hoops, but there's nothing special in activity itself. Some states don't even require that, it's not a matter of principle but more of how much regulation a particular jurisdiction wants to have.
JarJarJedi
12hr ago
There's certainly a contradiction. It may not be illegal - after all, it's not illegal to be a colossal hypocrite - but it's certainly looks contradictory when you say you collect donations to fight those people and then give those money - and a lot of money, they mention hundreds of thousands of dollars there - to the same people. Call it "informant" or anything else, it looks like it is - that they very much prefer the cause they pretend to destroy actually prospers so that they could collect more donations and pretend to fight it forever.
JarJarJedi
12hr ago
Yeah, I think the chances of actual conviction are pretty slim. The chances it could make SPLC brand radioactive and ultimately bring them down by attaching an image of "pretend to fight Nazis but actually are financing Nazis with your donations" to them are much bigger, and getting a grand jury sign under it is a good move in this direction.
JarJarJedi
12hr ago
That's practically impossible. Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind Wikipedia) does not do the editing and does not exercise any editorial control (excepting some rare cases where it is necessary to comply with the US laws). The editing cabals and Wiki admins are not controlled by Wikimedia and by any other official organizations, and a lot of them not even in the US. Those in the US would be protected by the First Amendment. Wikimedia sponsors a lot of stuff, including a lot of woke leftist stuff (don't think any Nazis though, SPLC is way ahead of the curve here), but there's no possible way to consider it fraudulent - they do it all in the open AFAIK. I am not very happy that the biggest and one of the most trusted (despite all) knowledge repositories on the planet is captured by the woke, but the US government can't do much about it, at least not without discarding the First Amendment, which would be a much bigger loss.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
covertly recorded video of poor training and poor supervision of daycare instructors and some seriously concerning misbehavior
I mean, they have actual daycare, actual instructors, they even have training (a poor one, but still) and they are complaining? Sweet summer children. They obviously never saw the real Quality Learing.
On the other hand, if there weren't any actual kids there, they couldn't be sexually abused there. So there's that.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
where we draw the dividing line between democracy and dictatorship
Well, at least in the US the answer is clear - where the DNC decides to draw it. And if that line looks like a gerrymandered district boundary in Illinois, that's by design. You can do every single thing that Orban did, and still remain a hero and a defender of Our Democracy, provided you did it in the service of and with approval of the Party. In fact, it won't be to hard to find an example for pretty much every item - maybe with minor tweaks - Scott charged Orban with, from recent proposals by Democrats, arguing this is absolutely necessary to prevent the death of Our Democracy.
Well, maybe not the child porn accusation - they used the accusation of holding secret documents instead. The pedophilia accusations came later, and did not result in search warrants.
I mean I am not to say Orban is a good guy. He's probably very corrupt, quite autocratic (not to the level where the moniker of "dictator" is appropriate, but he's no Voltaire) and likely a lot of bad stuff said about him is true, and he did not play nice. But the problem Scott has - and refuses to address it - is that in his own country, in his own state, in his own city, the politics is full of people who also don't play nice, in pretty much the same way, if not literally then directionally - and as long as they don't play nice to achieve the goals he wants to achieve, he'd been fine with it. That's normal, if politicians are not doing something outrageously stupid (which unfortunately is the filter not many in California politics pass), moreover, if they do what I want them to do, I wouldn't dig too much into how exactly they got there and wouldn't spend too much of my time on getting familiar with all dirt there is on every single one of them. I want clean politics, I prefer clean politics, but I know some amount of dirt is inevitable.
But to pretend there is some way to define "dictatorship" or any other term, so that Orban would fit, and Obama/Biden/DNC would not, and that if that definition exists, this is why the mainstream press is calling him a "dictator" (or any other term), is pure bullshit. It's always tactical, always motivated, always "who whom".
JarJarJedi
1d ago
From what I heard in general about writer salaries, not a lot. But maybe she's lucky. I know a lot of comedians process their own life drama into their entertainment content, I usually avoid those unless they are hilariously funny. Maybe if she becomes a writer on the level where her craft is worth it regardless of the baseness of the content, there would be a reason to reconsider. I'm sure then I'll hear about her somehow.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I was intrigued by what kind of article may have inspired this longwrite. So I went ahead and clicked (good judgement on that archive link, thank you for that). I read the title and the subtitle. I closed the browser tab. I know this kind of people exists. That's pretty much as much as I want to ever know about them. If somebody would want to torture me, but for some reason only psychologically, giving me a detailed account of their lives and inner thoughts would probably work quite well. That's likely unhealthy, and the healthy response would be to meet the horrors of this world face to face and overcome them, but I am only a weak man. So that's as much as I am prepared to think about Sophia Ortega.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
This is trivially reversible by simple Unicode normalization.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Yes, but why? Who wants to live like this?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
and without access to web search.
It has all the web search inside, up to the time of the last crawl. If you had any internet presence before they did the last crawl, it's there somewhere, so it doesn't need to search again.
stylometry is all you need.
You still have deniability, thin veil as it is. At least until the humans give up and start accepting LLM judgements as infallible. Given the progress of the idiocracy, we'll probably witness it in our lifetimes.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Yes, and of course the aristocracy everywhere considered itself "different breed", but with black slavery it's always more prominent. It's one thing when somebody is of the low birth and you can find it out by digging into the archives, and quite another when you literally see it in their skin color. If you take a Russian serf, feed him well, clean him up, dress him up and put him next to a typical Russian pomeshik, you'd see little difference. Not so with a black slave.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
They did. Selling serfs "without land" had been allowed in 1675, and while Peter I tried to limit family-splitting sales, it had been largely ignored. A Russian proverb says "the severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the optionality of following them" - this is one of the constants of Russian history, whatever is happening there otherwise. Other tsars tried to ban the practice too (yet another evidence that previous bans were ineffectual) but it was still widespread. Especially when dvornya (house serfs) were concerned, since there wasn't a concern about working the land there.
Here's an episode from the biography of famous Russian writer Turgenev: http://i-s-turgenev.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000007/st003.shtml who, being a young man, interfered with such a deal, planned by his mother. Since he was a noble and proclaimed he will shoot the police officer if he'd try to enforce the deal (Russia was much more wild back then) the deal was cancelled. The police officer opened an official investigation, but since he was a lowly village policeman, predictably investigation against a local noble went nowhere and had no consequences whatsoever.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
How does moral not come into tax questions?
I don't think this is a proper answer.
It's one of the main ways that the government slams it's weight around in the economy. How it does so can impact everyone's livelihoods.
Yes, but this does not explain a claim like "taxing X is a moral imperative" or "taxing X is morally abhorrent". I mean, you could make - and maybe even prove, who knows - such claims, but none of that directly from the fact that taxation is important. Yes, taxation is important, but it doesn't make a phrase like "tax advantage for AI labor is still morally wrong" more meaningful. You, essentially, claim that taxing AI is a moral necessity, but you provided no argument for it so far but saying "government taxes a lot of things and it has large impact". True, but does not prove that the questions of taxing AI has a moral dimension at all, let alone prove that the positive answer is morally necessary.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
we will never be capable of thinking in the sort of "my tribe versus other tribes" thinking we see in, say, Somali scammers.
Who is "we" here? I mean, some Davos dwellers like to think about a completely cosmopolitan society where tribal markers - at least for white people - are nothing but entertaining bits of trivia, but I suspect this is only until shit starts really hitting the fan. Then The Gods of Copybook Headings will be back. Living through that period probably gonna suck, because the excesses of tribalism are not very pleasant, but I don't think it's gone.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
For Russian serfs, I don't see any difference (except the racist aspect of course).
JarJarJedi
3d ago
on the grounds that white people should be enslaved too.
They were. It was called "indentured servitude". Yes, I know it wasn't hereditary, but for the person in it there wasn't too much difference in that.
BTW, returning to your Neolithic example, the question now if this prisoner finds a nice girl who wants to marry him and produces children, why shouldn't those be free? The whole argument does not work there if you want to make it hereditary.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Anything can be taxed out of existence (well, legal existence anyway) but I don't see any reason to adopt tortured metaphors - like equating human income to AI output - if anybody wanted to do that. Income taxes exist because it's easy to the government to raise money this way (most people have income, and need to have income to live, thus providing unending stream of taxes) and it appears "just" - after all, if you are getting some money, why not share it? Sharing is caring. But a lot of things had been taxed, so AI output could be taxed too, of course - I just not see how "moral" comes into it. On what theory there's even a moral question here?
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Yes, slightly over 50, once or twice a month. I don't get hangovers, at least not since very young and stupid student years, but I learned if I drunk too much, I felt very bad (nausea, stomach aches, etc.) so I stopped doing that and now limit myself to 1-2 drinks, or whenever I start feeling it's not good for me anymore. In my 40s, I was drinking about weekly, usually 1-2 drinks socially, but now even less for various reasons. Sometimes it could be several months without a single drink, sometimes could be a couple of times a week but on average it's about 1-2 times a months, and usually 1-2 drinks. I do enjoy drinking socially, usually with family or friends, so I am unlikely to give it up completely, but probably would keep this pace at least until some turn in my health would change it.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Still on Howling Dark, getting into the last 20%... Looks like Hadrian
JarJarJedi
5d ago
JarJarJedi
5d ago
It's pretty mild substantive critique, not aggressive at all. If that's "jumping at this so aggressively" for you, we must be visiting very different internets, and I almost envy you. But only almost because if (when) I am wrong, I'd rather be informed about it than stay wrong without knowing it. I don't see it as a personal attack (even though being wrong is unpleasant, but that's just my ego talking).
The FBI can lie on financial documents to pay informants. And I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the supposed Nazis are actually LARPing feds, I mean how many Whitmer plots do you need to get suspicious? But plebes are not allowed to do that. People have largely accepted that the FBI can paint outside the lines and ignore the law, because they are the FBI. But if the same authority is granted to every leftist NGO, the right has no chance to survive in this country. So if Trump admin messes this up and doesn't get jail conviction and corporate death penalty for SPLC, this would be an absolutely catastrophic loss. Not immediately catastrophic, but long term - you can not survive if your enemy is allowed to break the law without any repercussions but you have to walk on eggshells.
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