• 15 Posts
  • 331 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The Democrats do not have a realistic chance of winning against Trump because the Democrats are entirely incapable of challenging power. It’s the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. They won’t do anything for the people they need to vote for them because if they do the people who fund them will stop funding them.

    Obama and Sanders both excelled at small-dollar donations, of course. Sadly, Obama was a silver-tongued coward and the Clinton Democrats made sure she didn’t repeat the mistakes of 2008 in 2016 by not bothering to sign up voters in case they killed her in the primaries again.

    They dig their own grave and they do so willingly because it makes them exceedingly rich.





  • Demanding that people vote for the least worst option without any content other than sneering at them for apparently not realising that one of the options is worse, is doing exactly that.

    It’s straw-manning the arguments of people who want (and desperately need) the Democrats to be better and are putting serious thought, time and energy into how that is possible in a world controlled by billionaires who unleash fascism the moment their power is threatened.

    And they’re doing it with a lazy, cynical, Bill Maher-wannabe take because apparently they think this is a good look?

    They’ll be the death of us all.






  • I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

    One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

    Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

    This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

    The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.



  • The fact Starmer won’t even think about joining the single market is stupid too.

    Joining the single market would simplify border issues but it wouldn’t solve them… We’d have to join the Customs Union and the common VAT area as well to do that. SM-only is not completely pointless but there is a massive political risk attached because it doesn’t solve all the problems its advocates pretend it does.

    There are only two ways to make Brexit work. One is to be an EU member in all but name (following all the rules but having a very limited role in making the rules). The other is a united Ireland (with a lot more expenditure on customs and warehousing in Britain).

    The first is politically impossible, and also pointless. The second is up to the people of the island of Ireland and requires a British govt which is willing to invest in the real economy, rather than keeping most of us around to create the illusion of a real country instead of a tax haven based on a massive casino.






  • National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

    At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

    National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

    No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

    The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.

    The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

    National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

    Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.



  • JoBo@feddit.ukOPtoTechnology@lemmy.worldOn Being an Outlier
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    5 months ago

    The way he plays with the meaning of words

    She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

    any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

    Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

    Perhaps that is the point.

    That is, indeed, the point.