I’m discussing the specific choice of what rhetoric they decide to use, not why they are using it. Why they are using it is fairly obvious at this point.

There are many different lines, arguments, whatever that could be employed, though. By paying attention to which ones are specifically chosen, you can learn more about their target audience, which is larger than simply fans of a white, ultra-nationalist ethno-state. Hence their need to continue to use rationalizations like this, instead of being forthright about their intentions.

This one in particular surprised me, as I didn’t foresee it. They’re usually more predictable than that.

It was kind of inevitable, unfortunately. After we impeach one of them for even legitimate wrongdoing, if they do not counter-impeach us, they lose perceived legitimacy, which weakens them.

They had no other strategically sound moves, when you consider their goal of hanging onto power regardless of the wishes of the voting public.

That’s a clever line of attack, but having an opinion does not constitute a conflict of interest. Otherwise there would be a whole shit-ton of recusal happening every day.

A conflict of interest usually involves some form of monetary compensation or other fiscal benefit.

It’s kinda hard to wrap your brain around sometimes, but bad people can be patriots too. When you have a proper, full-scale war going on, these people become a resource like any other.

Anti-corruption is great during peace time. Necessary, even. But it cannot always be the top priority in all situations, that’s just not practical.

I would even argue that if you’re not continually adjusting your priorities as situations develop, you’re not a very good leader. So yeah, buy his guns now. Throw him in prison later. Can even confiscate back some of the money you paid. You have to win first though.

… they can’t find someone to come up with trivia questions worded in reverse word order? That’s really not that hard.

Ooh! They should use ChatGPT!

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we’re still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn’t realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn’t necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn’t know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It’s like when you’re trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

This comment is hilarious, and it being downvoted is sad.

If either of those figures is actually accurate from an end-user standpoint, then the entire downtime must be coming during my primary periods of usage.

Intelligent is where it goes wrong. They only claim to like intelligence, because that sounds good to claim. They’re actually extremely anti-intellectual in basically every way you can be. Real jocks vs nerds stuff, for people who never outgrew a HS mentality.

Surprised this one took so long. We’ve had basic hologram tech for decades now. Even with a private jet, it’s not like flying cross country all the time for business is fun or anything. Being on a jet is still being on a jet, and not being able to do anything except pull out your laptop, mobile device or book.

It’s been this way for weeks, actually. I haven’t seen a graph of the uptime, but I’m sure one would look extremely ugly, based on my own user experience.

This right here is an alt, and despite the fact that I don’t prefer to comment from it, since I won’t necessarily check in soon to see replies, it’s seeing some heavy use.

The attacks a few weeks ago weren’t a one-off, they never stopped. It seems down maybe half the time or so?

One of the many ways we (all of Lemmy) are not quite ready for the mainstream yet, we still have basic technical/security issues to resolve. Soon, though.

I’m not him, but now that I think about it, there is a tendency for many people to prefer the more generalized term.

Where scientists don’t tend to use the word scientist as much, I can’t recall ever seeing the term in a journal article for instance. (I don’t read many, but I’ll read an abstract here and there) I’m not sure why. I expect it’s some categorization thing, where not all scientists perform research, so researcher is the more precise term. I’m just guessing as to the reason though, I do not have a PhD.

Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

How do they change their innate intelligence? We’re not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?

We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone’s capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.

We’re getting there, still in the very early stages here. One thing I’ve noticed is how extremely techy the initial community here was, something I personally collided with like a bit of a wrecking ball. People in general, not just techy people, tend to assume others will approach things similarly to how they naturally do. So they don’t necessarily always see problems that others might stumble over, ahead of time.

Now that we’ve started growing more rapidly, these problems of scale, where they now have to anticipate problems they did not have to anticipate before, all are coming due. So, growing pains.

This is why I have not been inviting people to Lemmy yet, I’ve been waiting until it’s more polished for the mainstream. It’s also why the graph is trending down. We’re literally not ready yet for the mainstream, in many, many different ways.

Also useful to remember, we’re only done getting big growth spikes if spez is done pissing off reddit. I doubt he is.

Why does the purpose the data was collected for matter? Either the data is suitable or not. The motive of the pollsters who gathered it is irrelevant, isn’t it?

It’d still irritate them due to the connotations, regardless of how legally actionable their irritation would be.

We’d just get a new one made out of water vapor. I’m sure everything would be fine.

You know, everyone should start calling the service twiX, just to irritate the candy bar company, which is actually a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that does care how its brands are perceived.

I mean, it’s not a fever. It’s just sitting under a big pile of invisible blankets. Get rid of the blankets and things would be fine.

Yet despite the clear creation of echo chambers, which I think is inevitable given how freedom of association works so smoothly and easily online, the Fediverse forces them all to “live next to each other”.

It’s not an entirely separate service I need to go on if I want to see what all the Nazi kids are up to these days.

This forced adjacency and inability to create any blocks stronger than defederation (which is pretty weak, really, compared to what other services can do) is going to have overall beneficial effects in the long-run, I think. Though it’ll certainly cause its fair share of headaches too.