Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

From now on, you can’t trust any statement the government puts out. Governments have always lied to save face, but this is a new level where they don’t even have to pretend to have an argument or a spin on things. It’s “Oops! All Lies!” because it’s easier.

Why bother coming up with a plausible scenario when all anyone wants to know is the shit that already makes them feel good?

It’s not the most relevant to THIS guy, but in general, a government purposefully separating parents from their children with no means of reunion is one of the named conditions of cultural genocide.

Literally, it’s part (e) of the UN Resolution, the ‘Genocide Convention.’

… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
*(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[5]

We spent so long discussing the legitimate genocide in Palestine, and yet, so little on the damn genocide that has been happening within our borders since 2016.

I feel like it’s an eventuality that during a forest fire, misinformed hunters will just be firing rifles at firefighters trying to save their land.

checks notes

Wait… That already happened?

For anyone too lazy to read, ChatGPT does have guardrails for this kind of thing, but if you continue a conversation anyway, eventually it will stop giving that information and start just being agreeable. It basically gave the kid instructions, and actively discouraged him from any cries for help, because it might keep him from his goal.

My friends, I understand the notion to use an LLM as a cheap replacement for therapy, I genuinely do. But, please don’t use them for that, they cannot give you good advice, and they usually can’t even remember anything except the 128,000 token window it has open right then. A human therapist takes notes and remembers them.

Oh, nice. That covers anyone who leaves a flag out at night without a lamp shining on it. Or anyone flying a flag that has any tattered pieces.

If it turns out anything like Reddit’s attempt, the false-positive rate is going to be astronomical.

I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that Russia is pouring the entire future of its nation-state into keeping Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, so, I think it’s probably inevitable at this point given how little international support Ukraine has by now.

Why wouldn’t you need troops to stand at that border and make sure that Russia can’t just regroup and invade again in 6 years? Wouldn’t you call that ‘Peacekeeping’?

Minnesota is such a land of contrast. Rural parents will accept a gay son no problem but the second someone mentions a non-Christian, it’s World War 3.

so the media doesn’t know where they’re going and report on their treatment or conditions, or, hell, who was even in the groups deported.

Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It’s basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.

In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).

Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of ‘caucusing,’ which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.

In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.

So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.

Just FYI, it is so named “Gerrymandering” after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.