I thought Uncommitted was a smart use of the primaries.
More generally, obviously much more critical than in the election itself. But getting the right candidates in the primary, and pushing all candidates to be better in all the usual ways. They're never going to chase us to the left like they chase to the right, so we have to do the work and set the boundaries.
Choosing to treat anyone who thinks otherwise as too stupid to realise this is exactly why Trump might win. Please stop.
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.
You know the article has words in it that aren't in the headline?
And that if you actually care about Biden winning, you need to engage with these arguments or at least have the good sense to STFU for fear of alienating people even further?
Alienating the people you need to hold their nose and vote for Biden is exactly what you claim you don't want.
Is Biden winning less important to you than posting like a smug cunt who is in no danger from fascism and looks forward to being able say "I told you so."
Muppet.
Learn to read, comprehend what you read, think about what you read, and then avoid saying stuff that gets you the exact opposite of what you want. FFS
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.
Yeah, if you're going to comment you would, ideally:
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read the article
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comprehend what it is saying
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respond to it
Knee-jerk hand-waving is not useful. It's worse than just a waste of your time and ours, you are actively alienating everyone you desperately need to hold their nose and vote for Biden.
What are you trying to achieve here?
Obediently voting for the least worst option means you eventually run out of good options. <- we are here
The conundrum is working out how you force those options to get better without accelerationists getting to test out their theories for real (again).
I would respectifully suggest that "shut the fuck up and vote" does not cut it.
The president’s shedding key constituencies. If morality won’t move him to end his support of this war, will self-interest?
>Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.
>Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”
>Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”
Cigarettes were marketed as actively healthy and good for the lungs. They used doctors to sell them. And wanted everyone to know that the only reason that smokers kept dying of lung diseases is because cigarettes are good for lungs so of course people with bad lungs were smokers. Duh.
The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to 'prove' for questions like this.
We can't do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don't). It's how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn't necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.
Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women's tears makes men less aggressive. That's an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we're seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there's a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it's considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?
Etc etc.
Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).
That does rather beg the question of whether boys or girls are encouraged to be loud.
But maybe they're just picking up on teachers' biases? Teachers Give Lower Math Scores to Girls
They get away with it if the people they attack are less powerful than they are, yeah. Power is a thing.
No it doesn't. The dean who made this decision, as with most people in stable positions of power, does not need telling what to do because he will do it anyway.
Rutledge clerked for Clarence Thomas, and is featured in a painting included in ProPublica’s reporting on Republican donor Harlan Crow’s gifts to the Supreme Court Justice.
Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an "urgent" need to see a doctor).
But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair's worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.
When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs 'met' the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they'd only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.
It was very bad back then. It's much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.
Not that they're announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.
[The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]
I didn't say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.
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.
Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.
The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.
I’m used to that having full articles
Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.
Helluva headline given the story is about tied labour.
In 1985, Columbia students occupied campus to push for divestment from South Africa. Five months later, the university cut ties to the apartheid regime after years of dragging its feet
Worth reading in full but here's some snippets:
>In 1985, hundreds of Columbia students, led by the four-year-old Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), initiated a blockade of Hamilton Hall in the center of campus – the same hall peacefully occupied and renamed by students on Tuesday.
>The protest lasted for three weeks, drawing worldwide support. The administration photographed, videotaped and threatened student activists with disciplinary charges and expulsion. Five months later, after years of dragging its feet, the university divested from companies implicated in apartheid South Africa.
>In 2013 and 2014 a successful campaign by the Columbia Prison Divest students forced the university to divest from the private prison industry. Underlining the linkages of struggles, Students Against Mass Incarceration (Sami) sought the advice of Students for Justice in Palestine.
...
>Omar was a Palestinian student activist on campus at the time, supporting the Free South Africa Movement and highlighting striking similarities between the struggles in South Africa and Palestine to dismantle settler-colonialism and apartheid. Omar was deeply inspired by the divestment demand as a tactic to pressure a duplicitous and complicit institution. He later co-founded the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calling for ending international state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians.
The United Methodist Church marked a new era of LGBTQ inclusion by voting to lift the bans on LGBTQ clergy and on pastors performing same-sex unions. They also removed the language that said homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
An accused rapist who had sought to clear his name by suing one of Australia’s largest television networks for defamation has lost his case, with a judge finding that, on the balance of probabilities, he committed the crime.
>After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.
>Without a trial and a means to clear his name, Lehrmann turned to defamation action, claiming that Network Ten and “The Project” presenter Lisa Wilkinson damaged his reputation by providing enough information in the program for him to be identified, though he was not named.
>Network Ten and Wilkinson chose to fight the charge, mounting a truth defense, meaning that to win, the network’s lawyers needed to prove that on the balance of probabilities the rape happened.
>Lee found Monday that the two had sex that night, but Higgins was so inebriated she couldn’t possibly have given her consent – and that Lehrmann didn’t seek to obtain it.
>“I’m satisfied that it is more likely than not that Mr Lehrmann’s state of mind was such that he was so intent upon gratification to be indifferent to Miss Higgins’ consent,” said Lee.
>The ruling delivers a devastating blow to Lehrmann’s attempt to clear his name. As Lee put it in his judgement: “Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat.”
On Being an Outlier
>Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are imminently fixable with the right methodological tweaks.
>Common practices of technology development can produce this kind of naivete. Alberto Toscano calls this a “Culture of Abstraction.” He argues that logical abstraction, core to computer science and other scientific analysis, influences how we perceive real-world phenomena. This abstraction away from the particular and toward idealized representations produces and sustains apolitical conceits in science and technology. We are led to believe that if we can just “de-bias” the data and build in logical controls for “non-discrimination,” the techno-utopia will arrive, and the returns will come pouring in. The argument here is that these adverse consequences are unintended. The assumption is that the intention of algorithmic inference systems is always good — beneficial, benevolent, innovative, progressive.
>Stafford Beer gave us an effective analytical tool to evaluate a system without getting sidetracked arguments about intent rather than its real impact. This tool is called POSIWID and it stands for “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” This analytical frame provides “a better starting point for understanding a system than a focus on designers’ or users’ intention or expectations.”
An examination of the institutionalist perspective upon the election. A series about the election. Differentiators: Part 3.
Worth giving this a click but here's a few summary paragraphs:
>Trump's differentiator is authoritarian supremacy. This means that his pig ignorance, his grotesque indecency, his sexual assaults, his fraud and corruption, and his ability to walk around as a free man and enjoy press coverage that treats him like a normal participant in the democratic process even though he is an insurrectionist traitor to the constitution who threatens the families of the judges presiding over the 91 felony charges he faces are all positive qualities for him, because they are a way of demonstrating that he truly is an authoritarian supremacist. And so, as long as he promises maximum brutality against the people that our entrenched supremacist power systems don't favor, he gets to continue to rule over the public discourse and the law and basic human decency and even observable reality. His supporters' unshakeable support is how we can tell that authoritarian supremacy is what they want: they don't support him despite the fact that he is a rapist and a confederate criminal that enjoys total impunity, but because. Additionally, the fact that people who aren't paying much attention might slide his way is a pretty good way of detecting that brutality and supremacy and corruption are totally digestible parts of our status quo, intrinsic foundational aspects of the way things are.
>Biden's differentiator involves maintaining the status quo; a promise that things will go on relatively steadily rather than dropping immediately and completely into fascist tyranny run by by and for creepy Christian fanatics who want to control our bodies and our lives to satisfy the bigotry and self-regard that they worship as their god. That's a compelling differentiator, at least for those that our system hasn't yet consumed. Thus, even though I still don't like Joe Biden, I feel I must vote for him, because I can clearly see that the other way this can go gets much worse for far more people—trans and gay people, disabled and sick people, people in poverty, people who are pregnant or can get pregnant, Black people and Jewish people and other marginalized people, and even eventually coddled little me, because the threat of open emboldened fascism is vast, and the end of any form of democracy in our country is real.
>This is different from saying that things are not already very very bad for such people, as part of the status quo that Joe Biden promises to maintain.
>Biden's problem is that many of us can clearly observe that our culture, our arrangement of power, and our government is built to consume people, and the easily observable proof of this is all the people it consumes. For people who would rather not be consumed, what is needed is not for us to stay the course, but to find radical change not toward fascism, but toward diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion, in opposition to our nation's standard traditional unsustainable supremacy, for the same reason that a cancer patient should seek cancer treatment, rather than creating inevitable disaster in pursuit of a return to a unmodified life that their sickness has made unattainable.
>That means that even as I vote for Biden, I have to hold my culpability for voting for him and all the horrors that he is accommodating by maintaining and accommodating our status quo. On the other hand, if I didn't vote for him, I'd have to hold my culpability for not doing my part to prevent even worse from coming to even more people. And either way I must hold my culpability for my existence as a beneficiary of our supremacist system. I don't really have a position to take that frees me from culpability; that's how a supremacist system works. Trying to free myself of that culpability instead of holding it would just be another way of aligning with supremacy, which always blames its victims instead of itself.
Exclusive: ITV is considering taking paid ads from parties on its streaming platform where ban does not apply
>But the ban – last updated in 2003 – only applies to traditional television channels and not to streaming television delivered over the internet. With audiences increasingly switching off traditional broadcast channels, the UK’s big political parties are preparing to take advantage of the loophole and pay millions of pounds to insert themselves into living rooms.
>Tom Edmonds, who ran digital advertising campaigns for the Conservatives in the 2010s, said politicians were desperate to pay to access screens. He said if British broadcasters did not run such ads, US tech companies would happily take the money. “You are going to see political ads on your TV. A lot of it will go on YouTube because you can get it in HD on your TV,” he added.
>In the past, British political parties did not have enough money to buy campaign adverts. But Labour and the Conservatives are set to take advantage of a little-noticed rule change announced last year by Michael Gove, which will increase the amount national political parties can spend on a general election campaign from £19.5m in 2019 to £35m for the next general election.
Jane Willenbring was the first to blow the whistle on sexual harassment and assault in Antarctica. Years later, women are still coming forward with tales of horror as a government investigation unfolds.
Kansas Reflector saw every piece of its content blocked and removed from Facebook last week. Here's what we know about the situation now.
>I don’t believe that our coverage of the Marion County raid or Kansas Legislature led to the digital purge of Kansas Reflector content. But I can’t say that for certain, because Facebook has been maddeningly opaque about the entire situation. Stone outright denied that the likeliest target — a column from documentary filmmaker Dave Kendall criticizing the platform — was the culprit.
>But his technical explanation, given in a Friday afternoon phone call with editor in chief Sherman Smith, left us scratching our heads.
>“It had nothing to do with the content. It had nothing to do with the story that you guys wrote,” Stone said. He instead blamed a domain issue with three separate websites, all of which operate separately and just happened to have posted Kendall’s column.
>“It was a security issue related to the Kansas Reflector domain, along with the News From The States domain and The Handbasket domain,” he added. “It was not this particular story. It was at the domain level.”
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A fourth site - Little Green Footballs - was also blocked and marked as phishing/malicious. They didn't understand why until they saw this story and went to look to see if a commenter had posted it. They had. WTF? Meta Cancels LGF
Boeing's leaders are tepidly admitting the shareholders-first, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. It's an admission a generation in coming.
>The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
>“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
>To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
An anti-fascist coalition of various factions assigns blame ahead of time for a coming calamity. A series about the election. Differentiators: Part 2.
>Maybe, to the extend that we are institutionalists, we need to recognize that our vote doesn't free us from any other obligations between elections. Maybe we need to recognize the ways our commitment to institutions that abuse others have caused abused people to despair and mistrust us. Maybe we need to admit how we were wrong about the nature of our institutions, how we believed they protected and benefitted everyone simply because they protected and benefitted us. Some of us, if we are particularly unthreatened by fascism and particularly benefitted by supremacy, might need to realize that listening and following are more effective anti-fascist actions for us now than speaking and leading.
>Or maybe, to the extent that we are anti-institutionalist, we need to recognize that our anti-institutional alignment doesn't mean we aren't still culpable to the degree we are, and recognize that if we are taking that alignment primarily to evade culpability, we're still aligning ourselves spiritually with that institutional supremacy. Maybe we need to recognize that while elections aren't the only thing, they are still a thing. Maybe we need to recognize that just as voting doesn't free us from whatever culpability we carry, not voting doesn't free us, either.
A WIRED investigation uncovered coordinates collected by a controversial data broker that reveal sensitive information about visitors to an island once owned by Epstein, the notorious sex offender.
>Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, the Cayman Islands, and Australia, among others.
>Near Intelligence, for example, tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 US states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Font sizes on Lemmy: they vary too much?
If I have the right zoom level to make the text in the feed a sensible size, the font size in the threads is too small to read easily. Correct the zoom level in the thread and the font size in the feed becomes way too large.
This has long been a problem and I'm not sure why this is suddenly irritating me more than usual. Is it just me? Is there a setting I'm missing?
E2A: It's likely a browser issue. I've found a workaround, thanks all.
This isn’t its first failure, yet the tech giant is so embedded in the public sector that it seems invincible, says Sam Fowles, a barrister, author and broadcaster
Origins of a disaster: The Role Of Her Majesty’s Government In Shaping Horizon And The Post Office 1998-2000 | Eleanor Shaikh
Summary linked, long version here: https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/origins_of_a_disaster_-summary-_eleanor_shaikh.pdf
Both hosted by jfsa.org.uk, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance website.
>Driven by wider political agendas which included the protection of Japanese inward investment in UK plc, Blair ruled that the Post Office must purchase a salvaged version of Horizon. Insufficient work had been done to determine the viability of this option and the Post Office itself was adamantly opposed to the idea. Right up until the day before the Prime Minister’s decision, the Post Office were vociferous; they wished to terminate Horizon and start afresh with a new supplier. In any event, they argued they would need months to assess his chosen solution:
>>‘POCL believe that the hardware and software is probably sub-optimal as the platform for providing network banking and Modern Government services, but would need several months' work to have a clear view.'
Clauses in the former CEO’s contract could easily be enforced – but the whole rotten saga goes deeper
And all the others, thanks.
"Vennells’s incentive payments add up to £2.2m over the course of her time in charge. She may note that when James Crosby, former boss of HBOS, gave up his knighthood in 2013 after a parliamentary committee found he “sowed the seeds” of destruction at the bank, he volunteered to surrender 30% of his pension entitlement. Those were the days before clawback clauses but Crosby was nodding to the principle that giving up a gong is not enough. In a post-clawback world, matters should be simpler: the rules are meant to insist on repayment of bonuses. If the relevant clauses aren’t triggered in Vennells’s case, when would they be?
"None of which is to deny that the rotten saga goes further than her. The politicians with oversight roles of the state-owned Post Office clearly have questions to answer, as do the relevant executives at Fujitsu, supplier of the dodgy IT software. But, among the business crew at the top of the Post Office over the years, the two chairs during Vennells’s time must explain why they backed the executives to the hilt."
The head of Harvard’s fate was sealed when she became the focus of a culture war battle over antisemitism, plagiarism and free speech
What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial
As the Post Office (Horizon/Fujitsu) scandal is getting more coverage this week, I thought this accountancy blog (which talks about an accompanying video, for those who like video) might be of interest. I've been following this story for years but this is the first thing I've read that gets into the detail of what went wrong with the software.
>The Post Office trial is one of the few cases where an in-depth examination of system failures is made public and so it’s a valuable lesson to learn from. Even simple problems like maintaining a stock balance become complex when part of a distributed system. Techniques like ACID transactions can reduce the likelihood of errors but real implementations will sometimes fail. When a system processes a large number of transactions, this small probability of failure can add up to frequent errors. I hope that the presumption that computers operate correctly is revisited, and the factors revealed by the Post Office trial are taken into account when doing so.