helaoban

Nope, Ive's firm also designed the exterior.

>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.

Does this not apply to X users?

This makes no sense. The vast majority of driving is not being done for pleasure.

>Another culture clash, this time between Discovery’s unscripted empire and Warner’s premium sensibilities, a wannabe mogul overpaying so he could cosplay as Robert Evans (ask Claude), and a 5x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. The good news? The sequel had a short runtime. CEO David Zaslav slashed costs, engineered a good bank / bad bank structure to spin WBD’s declining linear assets, and ultimately orchestrated a bidding war that restored shareholder value. As an operator, Zaz is Ed Wood (see: the worst branding decision in history, deprecating HBO), but as an investment banker, he’s Steven Spielberg.

WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.

What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?

Gurus are going to guru I guess.

So now heads of state are fair game for unilateral elimination without a declaration of war

This should be fun.

"Trump Rolls the Dice on Regime Change" (1)

What a headline. Anybody else have this on their election day bingo card?

Midterms should be a blood bath though, right? Right? (insert Anakin meme).

1. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-rolls-the-dice-o...

If you instigate a war you are responsible for all casualties.

I like Special Military Operation better.

Does the term landslide have a widely accepted definition? One definition could be winning every single swing state, which Trump did.

I think you also have to factor in the degree of political polarization today, and in particular Trump's polarizing nature, which means that there is smaller pool of "effectively independent" voters to fight over. So 1% today is worth more than %1 in 1984. These, are of course, not particularly quantifiable measures.

The point is taken tough, "comprehensive victory" would have been the more appropriate description.

If you want to challenge a point, then challenge it. Don't cower behind ambiguous snark.

If that is the case, you have to explain why right wing propagandists have been so much more successful than left wing ones.

I don't want to ascribe any particular political beliefs to the commenter, the quip about re-education was somewhat of a joke given the irony of somebody arguing against dictatorship by invoking mass "deprograming". But many a true word is spoken in jest.

There are no real Maoists or true communists in the US anymore, at least not enough to constitute meaningful political forces. To the extent they exist they are irrelevant, and one can argue further that no true left remains in the US at all.

As for my analysis of the Trump phenomenon, I only have intuitions and biases to offer, so caveat lector.

I don't think it's particularly mysterious. The general perception is that the American left has made identity politics and social justice its main political and social programs, to the detriment of basic governance, most importantly the economy and security, thereby breaking the social contract.

You cannot be a party that aggressively defends and promotes the interests of minority classes at the expense of the majority without loosing the support of the majority. In some cases, these minorities are so small as to border on the absurd.

Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size. The same goes for the LGBT population, which represents maybe 10% of the US population (and that's a liberal estimate).

Try as you might, you cannot escape the cold, hard fact that 60% the US population is white, with something closer to 70% identifying as white or partly white. 90% percent of that group is going to be straight.

The US middle and working classes still really haven't recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, the aftermath of which precipitated a huge transfer of wealth from these classes to the upper class, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.

So you have a majority of the population who are reeling from a devastating loss of wealth, station, and status, unable to keep pace with inflation, watching one of the two main political parties aggressively promote the interests of a tiny minority at their expense, or at least that is the perception.

Putting aside the nature of the minorities in question, the subservience of the political class to a minority of the population has another name: elitism. The natural response to elitism is populism, which is what we are seeing.

The protection of minority rights is a noble cause, but it's primarily a civil rights issue, and the focus should be on making sure those classes are treated equally under the law. The goal should not be the elevation of their social and cultural station above the majority.

Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy. People can rage at me all they want for that description, but that is what the majority of Americans perceive. Again, putting aside any questions of morality, it is political suicide.

Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration. Again, the perception is that interest of minorities (in this case migrants) are primary to the interests of the majority. In this case the minority are not even American citizens.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, and I'm sure you can find more persuasive analyses from better sources, but these are some of my intuitions.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

1. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...

I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.

You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.

I don't think there's been a greater indictment of a political program (the one you likely subscribe to) in history than Trump's landslide victory in 2024.

You guys used to call deprogramming by another name, I think it was called "re-education". Maybe you should sign up for your own class.

Pedantry.

The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798, and aerial forces until the creation of the The Department of the Air Force in 1947, whereafter it was left with just the army and renamed the Department of the Army. All three branches were then subordinated to the new Department of Defense in 1949, which became functionally equivalent to the original entity.

The Department of War is what it was called when it was first created in 1789 by the Congress (establishing the department and the position of Secretary of War), the predecessor entity being called the The Board of War and Ordnance during the revolution.

The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.

Easiest $2.8 billion made in history?

The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.

Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.

The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.

Edit:

There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.

It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.

The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.

Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.

It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.

Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?

Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".

this is so cool

Can we pause and admire the sheer contagiousness of the debate? We are now extending it to the meta-realm, discussing the possible mental states that led to one or more of the original participants adopting certain lines of reasoning...

What did we do to our world.

Sigh, when will people stop reaching for Hitler / Mussolini analogies to explain every political development they witness in their lives? It really is a remarkable achievement by the propaganda departments of the victors of the 2nd world war that 80 years later this is still the only framework by which their citizens understand the world.

History didn't start in 1918, and if you think the political situation in the US right now is anything like interwar Europe, then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

> Still, wouldn't her detention be arbitrary and thus fall foul of habeas corpus principles which I have no doubt are in the US law?

That's for a court to determine, and I'm sure it takes several weeks at least for something like this to make its way through the court system.

Yes, I think it's a generally rare occurrence to be confronted this way about one's belief in God in the US, having lived here most of my life. Perhaps the circumstances warrant it, but I think the statement that the nurse had "never seen a Canadian there before" and that her plight elicited that statement from the nurse is farfetched, seeing as the nurse would have seen much much worse from other detainees.

The story is pretty incredible on its face, so I don't see why some skepticism on the way it's being reported isn't justified, especially in the face of reflexive hysteria over a descent into fascism we're supposedly facing.

Again, if true, it is disgusting, and I'm negatively disposed towards ICE and the CPB in general. But I'd like to know whether this is a case of a really odd situation paired with bad judgement and/or bad advice, or something much worse.

I'm sorry, but the article seems to obscure a key fact, which is that she travelled to the US AFTER her initial visa was revoked.

It seems dumb to travel to a country that has explicitly revoked your visa without being granted a new one!

Nobody stopped her from getting on a plane because nobody checks if Canadians have a visa or not since they don't need one for short visits or stays. In this case her visa was revoked, so she was probably flagged in the system as temporarily not allowed in.

This is speculation, but maybe somebody here can weigh on the technicalities of the situation.

This is not to excuse the inhumane treatment, which if true is disgusting. Dealing with the CBP is always negative, even as a citizen (when returning from abroad).

Edit:

This really stretches credulity:

> I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”

Edit2 (more dumb):

> There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning

>Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?

Really? Not having your passport on you is the big mistake here?

Edit 3 (Even more dumb):

> One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.

> Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.

Trying to game the asylum system by lying to immigration authorities.

I'm not sure how all these cases are supposed to sustain the main thrust of the article, which is that all these people are innocent victims of some Kafkaesque nightmare for which they bear no responsibility. They clearly do.

We shouldn't be treating people like this period, but this is just really stupid behavior.

For what definition of professional or proficiency does one achieve "general professional proficiency" in French in 24 weeks...

Lol. The opposite is true. We live in time when lying to the population has never been more difficult.

Before the internet, information control and media capture by the state was near total, and lying to the entire population was the default practice.