sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
The initial reaction seems to be that this is largely more of the same grainy video that we’ve previously had - with a few key exceptions. The big on being reporting by Peter Doocey is NASA records (picture and communications logs) from the Apollo missions. NASA astronauts reporting and confirming observations of very bright luminescent angular objects tumbling in the moons atmosphere. Also appearing formation in some videos. The NASA comms logs seem significant. Trained military and science professionals of the highest order. Reporting that they see a bogey out the window. Ground control asks “is that the booster?”. Astronaut says “it’s a bogey”.
The NASA/Borman audio is also old. I checked the Metabunk thread (my usual source of analysis on UFO stuff) and someone pointed out an 8 year old Youtube video with the same audio. The thread is only a few hours old so they don't have analysis of most of it yet, but the linked explanation of the Chandelier video as a diffraction pattern is typical of how I expect the rest of it to turn out.
Interior, subjective mental experience? Something that cannot be tested objectively, even in theory, per the philosophical zombie idea?
It can be tested in theory. You just need to understand what internal processes constitute consciousness in the brain, understand the internal processes of a LLM, and determine if sufficiently equivalent processes are occurring. Until then we have to do our best based on our current understanding of LLMs and the human mind, based on which I think they aren't. Yeah some of the terms here aren't understood well enough to be well-defined, but the history of science shows that's a common problem.
If we can't test it, it may as well not exist.
It matters if you think conscious beings are morally relevant. I remember this blog post from Yudkowsky:
Belief in the Implied Invisible
Added: To make it clear why you would sometimes want to think about implied invisibles, suppose you're going to launch a spaceship, at nearly the speed of light, toward a faraway supercluster. By the time the spaceship gets there and sets up a colony, the universe's expansion will have accelerated too much for them to ever send a message back. Do you deem it worth the purely altruistic effort to set up this colony, for the sake of all the people who will live there and be happy? Or do you think the spaceship blips out of existence before it gets there? This could be a very real question at some point.
Unlike understanding the internal activity of the brain and how it compares to the internal activity of an LLM, transmitting information faster than light is, according to our current understanding of physics, actually impossible. Lets say you're working on the spaceship and you think you've discovered a mistake that will, when it tries to land at its destination, cause it to explode. If you report the mistake, the launch will be delayed and you'll suffer professional inconvenience because you missed it for so long. If you don't, you guess the ship will explode and everyone will die, but what actually happens will be completely impossible for anyone on Earth to detect by any means under the laws of physics. Do you report it?
The same is true for AIs to some extent, there are things you can say to make AIs happy or upset, a reasonable person can infer their mental state and enthusiasm by observing how they behave.
The same is true of fictional characters. If I'm playing D&D I can predict how Throgg the half-orc barbarian will react to his wife dying, but I don't think he's conscious whether he's being roleplayed by a human or a LLM. Note that sometimes fiction doesn't try to be realistic, and the same factors can influence the character whether it's being written by a LLM or not. If Throgg is written as part of a light-hearted black comedy with a running joke about his club, both humans and LLMs are more likely to write his dialogue as part of joke where he responds with indifference to "They burned your house!" and "They burned your wife!" but bursts into tears at "They burned your club!". The only reason LLMs assuming a persona talk similarly to real humans is that most of the text they're trained on incorporates some level of psychological realism and so that is part of their default genre.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
Virtually none of the responses online seem to have read the article and engaged with what it's saying. He doesn't say it's necessarily conscious, he questions what consciousness is for if consciousness isn't necessary for this sort of behavior, and how we could distinguish the difference.
But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?
When an animal does something complicated or improbable — a beaver building a dam, a bird giving itself a dustbath — a Darwinian immediately wants to know how this benefits its genetic survival. In colloquial language: What is it for? What is dust-bathing for? Does it remove parasites? Why do beavers build dams? The dam must somehow benefit the beaver, otherwise beavers in a Darwinian world wouldn’t waste time building dams.
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers. First, is consciousness an epiphenomenon, as TH Huxley speculated, the whistle on a steam locomotive, contributing nothing to the propulsion of the great engine? A mere ornament? A superfluous decoration? Think of it as a byproduct in the same way as a computer designed to do arithmetic, as the name suggests, turns out to be good at languages and chess.
Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.
Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious, or zombie, way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
I think the evolutionary environment of biological evolution and LLM training are so different that it's not too surprising that consciousness ended up evolving with one but not the other. The fact that in their base capability as text-generators they will write both sides of the conversation, with "write only one side of the conversation using the 'assistant' persona" being a later addition, is a strong indication that their internal processes are not the same as the hypothetical conscious mind of that fictional persona. It's the same way humans can write fictional characters or roleplay without those characters being conscious. (Throgg the half-orc barbarian isn't conscious regardless of whether a human or a LLM is roleplaying as him, we're just using our intelligence and knowledge to imagine what he would say.) But people could at least engage with what he's saying instead of hallucinating some completely different argument.
sodiummuffin
9d ago
The key difference is the level of coordination required. Having police requires 50%+ coordination, otherwise they can just vote to legalize crime or have the police become an extension of organized crime. Similar to how the two arguments for red are the ultra-optimistic "100% can just save themselves by pressing red" and the pessimistic "we can't get to 50% coordination on blue so we should cut our losses", two parallel arguments against police would be "100% can just decide to not commit crime" and "we can't trust a 50% majority with the power of policing, we're better off with anarchy where everyone buys a gun and defends themselves even though there will be inevitable losses". Yes they aren't identical - for instance a draw for crime is people who (usually falsely) believe it will benefit themselves, while a draw for blue is people who believe it will benefit others - but they both reflect the difference between the unrealistic idealism of 100% coordination and the everyday practicality of 50% coordination.
vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right
Reeducating criminals to not be criminals doesn't solve criminality because even a tiny minority who don't listen to you can commit a lot of crime. We already teach the majority to not be criminals, it's just that the leftovers don't need a majority. Societies pull off that level of coordination all the time, even armies don't have 50% desertion rates. The button scenario doesn't have the opportunity to explicitly communicate and coordinate beforehand like the military does, but it's also an easier scenario where 50% provides 0 casualties, unlike knowing that coordination will still result in a large percentage getting shot.
sodiummuffin
10d ago
What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind?
Here is my post about it from when it was last discussed 2 years ago:
Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.
If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.
In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.
It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.
I think 60% might be enough to make me switch, but this is influenced by having seen polling where even in randomized polls targeting the general public blue only gets 74% of the vote if you exclude those who responded "I don't know" and 63% if you don't. (I think the general public is more blue than internet voters because this is one of those cases where instincts usually give a good answer but then people can talk themselves out of it based on stuff like half-remembered game-theory puzzles.) The 60% threshold would have to induce 19% of blue voters to switch to drop from 74% to 60%, it's hard to guess if that would happen. Originally before seeing any polling I think I would stick with blue at 60% and switch at 70%. Of course this is assuming it is a surprise and there's no opportunity to do stuff like talk about it, orchestrate pro-blue government advertising campaigns, and hold public-results rehearsal polls beforehand. Very high thresholds would be viable if we could do stuff like that.
sodiummuffin
15d ago
Individual criminals cannot consistently enforce a world-wide treaty regulating AI development, making violence they commit useless and counterproductive. Only laws adopted and enforced by the most powerful countries in the world can do that. If you kill Altman or blow up a datacenter then you are arrested and they continue with a different CEO or a different datacenter, if you slaughter every OpenAI employee then Anthropic does it, if you somehow personally hunt down and kill everyone in the U.S. who knows what a "transformer" is then China does it. Here is the post he wrote on the subject following the attempted firebombing:
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
Like any other form of bias, it both affects how people interpret events and is affected by events themselves. Compare to political partisanship: the public's interpretation of political scandals (of varying levels of real or fake) is obviously enormously affected by both their personal political views and the political views of the media sources and social circles they trust. You can probably think of plenty of cases where very similar actions have been interpreted differently by partisans and biased organizations depending on which party they're associated with. At the same time it's not completely detached from reality, not everyone is maximally partisan so there really are actions you can take to make your political party more or less popular.
That doesn't mean being generically "likable" is the best strategy either, you can also do things like decrease the influence of your political enemies or do things that have a real-world impact that people like even if they don't like the policy in abstract. If Trump successfully changed the political leanings of mainstream media institutions, or Israel successfully helped the Iranian protestors take over the government, then that would help their popularity more than it pissed people off so long as it didn't require doing anything really unpopular like mass-arresting journalists or using nuclear weapons. Conversely if Israel made all palestinians citizens that would make the population of Israel a lot more anti-jewish despite it being "likable". Anti-white bias has had a recent surge in influence via the growth of the social-justice movement despite sustaining itself on stuff like "police are allowed to defend themselves and sometimes make mistakes" and "the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till", sometimes an influential ideology really does hate you enough that you'll make more progress by trying to fight that ideology than by playing nice. Anti-Israel bias isn't as detached from their recent actions, at least not in the west, but it's a reminder that determining the net impact of an action long-term is more complicated than checking popularity polls.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Also, "humans" means at least 6 out of 10 volunteers must have been able to solve some puzzle for it to be included, not 10 out of 10.
Note the "human baseline" isn't based on the human average, it's based on the "second-best first-run human playthrough" among the 10 people tested for each individual puzzle.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Administration officials [...] have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing.
This isn't actually true. What Rubio actually said was that the specific timing was determined by Israel finding an opportunity to kill a bunch of leaders, the war itself was planned before then. It was just quoted out of context by some media outlets.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
This shows once again weakness of premise of effective altruism and 80,000 hours movement that money alone is sufficient to change the world. It is not specific to communism/leftism, many cases of right wing money wasted in even more pointless way.
One of the main premises of effective altruism is that some forms of altruism are vastly more effective than others. Some people wasting vast sums of money ineffectively is very much compatible with that.
Many effective altruists have also specifically been wary of political giving (like Scott's article Beware Systemic Change), especially when it takes the form of picking a side in a mainstream left-vs-right tug-of-war rather than finding niche "pulling the rope sideways" issues that are disproportionately important compared to how much the public cares about them. Yes the controversial issues also matter, but they believe those are generally not where you can most effectively spend a marginal dollar (or even a marginal 250 million dollars).
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Per the Census, if you exclude multiracial people who identify as both white and another race from "non-white" it goes down from 144 million to 113 million. Note that people who identify as both white and hispanic are already included in "white alone", counting all hispanics as non-white raises it to 160 million. So we're hypothesizing a DHS white-supremacist who thinks Barack Obama is white and then rounds from 113 to 100. I'm guessing the "dogwhistle for number of non-whites" claim was from someone who looked at a "whites in U.S." statistic that included multiracial people, falsely assumed it could be subtracted from the U.S. population to get the number of non-whites, and then thought 113 million was close enough.
Presumably the actual explanation is that "100 million" is a big round number chosen without any reference to actual statistics as a hyperbolic way of saying "more deportations good". It could say "1 Billion Deportations" and the meaning would be the same. Also I very much doubt that accusations of twitter dogwhistles are having much impact on people's opinions on the Trump administration at this point.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Fascist ideology isn't particularly well-defined and is mostly notable for its role among the Axis countries during WW2. This provides a good sanity-check when comparing something to fascism: is it more or less similar to fascism than the Allies were? If something wasn't distinctive to the fascist countries, but in fact was widespread among other countries as well, then one begins to suspect that the purpose of associating it with fascism (rather than with the countries that defeated fascism) is because the former has a worse reputation. You can define fascism so broadly that all of WW2 was just fascist infighting, but that makes it a much less useful label and means people have less reason to care about it.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Daniel Lakens: Impossibly Hungry Judges
Andreas Glöckner: The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated
In short: the supposed effect is absurdly large, with the probability of a favorable ruling going from 65% to almost 0% before a break. The far more likely explanation is that, since the order of cases is not random, worse cases are scheduled last. In particular, it makes sense for judges to put short cases last rather than ones anticipated to go over time, and losing cases are shorter.
This sort of explanation should be the first thing we consider when hearing about a supposed effect like this. Outside of actual randomized control trials selection bias tends to be more powerful than the effect being investigated and common methods like "we controlled for some things we thought of and assumed any remaining discrepancy was the effect we're looking for" are inadequate for dealing with it.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The term "legal observer" was trademarked in the U.S. by the National Lawyers Guild, a longstanding radical activist group. I mostly remember them from Days of Rage, regarding them funding and otherwise supporting the Weather Underground. Searching around I can't find confirmation of whether she was actually a certified NLG Legal Observer or if it's other activists using the same terminology, as another comment pointed out even the ACLU uses the term. (And it looks like the trademark is lapsed.)
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
There's a Cremieux post about this specific meme:
No, White Women Are Not The Biggest Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets.
There's a Cremieux post about this specific meme:
No, White Women Are Not The Biggest Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action
TLDR: The source usually cited for this claim is a 1995 Department of Labor report, but it doesn't actually say that or provide any evidence indicating it's true. It spread via journalists/activists hearing it from each other and repeating it without checking. It doesn't make sense if you're familiar with actual affirmative-action policies and the lawsuits over them, and a study found that "the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men".
I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.
There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.
Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive (see the edit at the bottom with Paizo's response). In case anyone was wondering why the rulers of Cheliax who worship Asmodeus (the ruler of Hell with Tyranny as one of his divine domains) have canonically abolished slavery. Whatever else is happening, culture war is as well, and not just as a cover for other motives.
On the CW side, D&D races have always been more than halfway towards species, really. Sure, you have (fertile) half-elves and half-orcs, so a full speciation between these groups has technically not happened. (I do not consider thieflings to be evidence that devils and demons share the same species as humans any more than I consider Jesus or Greek heros to be evidence of God or Zeus sharing a species with humans, in either case it seems like magic is involved in the conception.)
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. "Race" as a term for a group with a shared ancestry predates and has a broader definition than modern biological classifications. D&D used the term race and not "species" because Tolkien and other fantasy authors did, and the reason why they used it is due to writing settings that are descended from premodern myths/fairy-tales and that are meant to evoke a premodern sense of the world. Heck, in 3.x (the edition I'm most familiar with) the apes in the Monster Manual literally have claws, I'm guessing because someone made a deliberate decision to not base them on real-life apes but instead inaccurate medieval bestiaries. So there's no reason to assume D&D crossbreeding follows the rules of modern biology in the first place.
Always Chaotic Evil trope
One annoying thing about discussions of D&D racial alignments is how rarely they engage with the actual text. "Always [alignment]" was of course invented by 3rd edition and used for outsiders like demons, some undead like ghouls, and a handful of other creatures like dragons and mind-flayers. Orcs by contrast are "Often chaotic evil". Those terms were defined thusly in the Monster Manual glossary:
Always: The creature is born with the indicated alignment. The creature may have a hereditary predisposition to the alignment or come from a plane that predetermines it. It is possible or individuals to change alignment, but such individuals are either unique or rare exceptions.
Usually: The majority (more than 50%) of these creatures have the given alignment. This may be due to strong cultural influences, or it may be a legacy of the creatures' origin. For example, most elves inherited their chaotic good alignment from their creator, the deity Corellon Larethian.
Often: The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common.
If they actually engaged with it I wonder if a lot of SJWs would actually find this more objectionable. "Skewed distributions of traits, not absolute rules" are, after all, the sorts of differences based on race or sex that people tend to believe exist in real life.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
No, that part is very real. (Unlike the vague nonsense that makes up most of the rest of his post.) If Pfizer had followed their planned trial endpoints they would have announced results days before the 2020 election. Instead they chose to leave samples frozen without testing them until afterwards. I wrote about this years ago, it was clear what had happened just from public information, but earlier this year there was also some new evidence via the House Judiciary Committee:
GSK further informed the Committee that Dr. Dormitzer had told GSK employees that "in late 2020, the three most senior people in Pfizer R&D were involved in a decision to deliberately slow down clinical testing so that it would not be complete prior to the results of the presidential election that year."
As I mention in my old linked post, I wonder how much their actions ended up affecting trust in the vaccine, and by extension how many lives it cost.
I don't think it would have reversed the political association, despite people like Kamala Harris and Andrew Cuomo expressing doubts about a vaccine approved during the Trump administrations. Ultimately I think left-wing/mainstream media outlets would probably have still been pro-vaccine, and left-wingers would have still generally listened to them. But I think it might have made a significant impact on right-wingers if Trump had actively campaigned on his administration making it possible for the vaccine to be developed and approved so quickly. Which implies that a world where the trials concluded pre-election would have significantly higher acceptance of the vaccine overall.
You are putting too much weight on second-hand and third-hand quotes. Even when not outright made-up, such quotes tend to be some mixture of out of context and paraphrased in a way that changes their meaning. This is especially true when the people passing along the quotes strongly disagree with even the things the quoted person has actually said, or when you are concerned about something different from the person passing it along. Even when being honest, people tend to repeat the meaning they heard, not the actual words that were said.
For example, lets say he makes a joke that some people think is offensive, will the people telling this to a reporter and the reporter writing both make it clear in the paraphrase used and the context mentioned that he was joking? If the person repeating it thinks making such jokes is "racist", and furthermore that Watson is a "racist crank" anyway because of his comments regarding the IQ gap, he probably thinks it doesn't matter whether the comment is a joke or not. Whether joking or serious, the comment carries the same meaning: "I am racist". (Similar to this misquote from a now-ex Washington Post reporter, to her the fake Charlie Kirk quote and the real one conveyed the same meaning.) Then you come along looking for whether Watson is "kooky" and suddenly it actually matters a lot whether something is a pet theory he passionately believes in, a speculative hypothesis he entertained for a couple sentences, or an outright joke that he never even seriously suggested. Even without deliberate dishonestly, the witness and the journalist can lossily encode his statements in a way that conveys the information their ideology cares about but drops or distorts the information people with different beliefs care about.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
You can't just compare outcomes to determine the success of an intervention unless you know the counterfactual outcomes would otherwise be the same! Semiconductor companies were not at risk of the U.S. government banning CPUs, while cryptocurrency companies were at serious risk of the government banning or heavily restricting key features of their business.
Imagine a lobbyist for a criminal justice reform group was bragging about his campaign's success. He thinks they did pretty well: they got rid of a 3-strikes law, reduced minimum sentences, and made more people eligible for parole. But a veterans' lobbyist hears this and responds "Parole? I'll have you know that my lobbying is so effective that they don't throw people in prison for being veterans at all!".
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
The contingent/alternative electors were appointed before he lost all of those court cases and their appeals. If they had not been, they would have missed the deadline for appointing electors and he would have lost even if the courts ruled in a way that would make him the winner. If you think court cases should have the power to affect the outcome even after that deadline, that implies support for appointing the "fake electors" (or for the more extreme measure of trying to outright ignore the deadlines and appoint them after the fact).
There's a reason Gore's lawyers were considering doing the same thing in 2000 before the Supreme Court rendered it moot. The whole complaint about the "fake electors" seems to me like something people ended up focusing on because it was easier to use as a pretext for prosecution of him and the electors themselves, because the thing he actually did wrong (be a conspiracy theorist who falsely believed the election was stolen) isn't illegal.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
It seems safe to assume that sending multiple GOP congressional offices American flags with "optical illusion" swastikas embedded in them is the action of someone who dislikes Republicans and probably associates them with Nazism. The same way that protestors with signs coupling Bush or Trump with Nazi imagery are virtually always anti-Republican, while protestors combining Obama with Nazi imagery are anti-Democrat, except even more so because of the aspect of deception and trying to produce negative headlines about the targets. So how is it indicative of "the embedded antisemitic and pro nazi rhetoric in lower level staffers", rather than the rhetoric of the person who sent it?
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Politico: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat
This is apparently the context of the headline "I love Hitler" comment:
AD: Yea I had some back and forth with the VC in Michigan, current chair is a deer in headlights
AD: We have a call Wednesday
PG: Many agree
AD: He did say "My delegates I bring will vote for the most right wing person"
PG: Great. I love Hitler
This is obvious sarcasm mocking the idea of automatically voting for whoever is most right-wing.
Skimming the article seems to indicate this dishonesty is a systematic issue. For instance it specifically claims "the watermelon people" was referring to black people without providing context, when it very likely refers to Gaza supporters in reference to their use of the watermelon emoji as a symbol. If you search "watermelon people" on Twitter every usage I can find before this article is about Gaza, it seems to be an established term.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
The "blood boys thing" was just him investing in longevity research companies looking into the thing where mice given blood transfusions from younger mice are seemingly rejuvenated. That got media outlets that hated him running sensationalist titles about him being a vampire and the TV show Silicon Valley taking inspiration from them. I think investing in medical research is good and not an indication of being a serial killer, especially longevity research which seems badly neglected.
Incidentally last I heard there was some research on the subject indicating it also works with saline + 5% albumin instead of young blood, but that's from 2020 and I don't know what the current state of the research is. A quick search finds this 2025 study claiming it's about "diluting age-elevated proteins as the way to re-calibrate systemic proteome to its younger state" but I don't know if that's the mainstream view. I don't know whether any of this is close to applications in humans.
The direct impetus for the air strikes was obviously the Iranian protests and the slaughter of thousands of protestors weeks before. Having the government of Iran be replaced by protestors who owe the success of their revolution to U.S. airstrikes is presumably a best-case outcome for the U.S. (and for Iranians), but Trump has varied between explicitly calling for regime change and minimalist goals regarding further destroying their nuclear program, probably in large part so that he can declare victory regardless of how things turn out.
When the protests were still ongoing Trump was supposedly hours from ordering air strikes against Iranian police/etc. to support the protestors but was talked down, supposedly in part by Netanyahu fearing retaliation before Israel was prepared for it. There was a lot of talk at the time about how this was a betrayal of the protestors, who he urged to take over the institutions and implied U.S. support but then didn't deliver while they were slaughtered. Meanwhile U.S. assets were moved into the region to support a better-prepared attack. By the time U.S. assets were in place the protests had been suppressed but Trump went ahead with the attack anyway. Since the attack both Trump and Reza Pahlavi have been explicitly urging the protestors to wait and it is unclear if Trump believes revolution is now futile, if he wants to do more work to weaken the regime before calling for protests to resume, or if he wants to keep his options open between some sort of agreement and attempting regime change.
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