but can I say he’s wrong? I don’t know.

Not a cult. Not a cult. Not a cult. Not a cult.

Anakin brought balance to the force by slaughtering all of the Jedi.

Before, thousands of Jedi, like 4(?) sith.

After, 2 Jedi, 2 sith. Perfectly balanced.

Gmail data gets used in LLM training. I wonder how Gemini 2.5 would auto complete “The code to the nuclear football is”…

Holy loaded language Batman? “Attacking” the “way of life?” It’s women’s high school sports, not some ancient and sacred tradition. Just kids trying to have fun.

Get some goddamn perspective please. Transphobes didn’t care about women’s highschool basketball until it gave them a wedge issue to attack transwomen. The fact that it became a topic and a talking point has nothing at all to do with how much an issue it actually is.

Fair, if you really are curious what was going on in my brain it was first I looked at it and assumed mm.dd.yy, because context clues led me to assume you are American, but then I noticed the year was 2007, so I swapped the year and the month mentally without revisiting the entire thing. Idiot in a hurry syndrome, no one uses yy.dd.mm.

Oh! I missed that! For some reason I thought it was Feb 11 not Nov 2

2025 - 2007 = 18, actually.

It’s kind of crazy remembering 1) horrible Bush was, 2) how much better Bush was than the current administration in retrospect.

The point about the conspiricists now toeing the Republican party line was prescient.

Good article, thanks for sharing.

I think you’re reading more intent in my post than was actually present. I’m not denying we did genocide to 100 million natives. All I’m denying is that Jackson specifically is significantly worse than the historically reasonable alternatives to the position. Had (for instance) John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe doctrine and a big proponent of western expansion, won the presidency, I do not doubt that a similar overall trajectory would have taken place. Maybe we wouldn’t have specifically had a trail of tears moment, but there’s more to the genocide of native americans than just the trail of tears.

And this is absolving responsibility of all the people who maintained slavery, which one could argue is even worse than jim crow.

How so? I believe you’re arguing in good faith, but I honestly don’t see how you come to this conclusion from what I wrote?

I’m not really trying to weigh and decide if 6000+ deaths and forcible removal of 100k+ people from their homes is better or worse than 100 or so years of systemic oppression followed by more, quieter oppression. Instead, I’m looking at this from the perspective of alternatives.

After the Civil War we very nearly had a moment when we could have maybe did something real for racial equality beyond anything we’ve seen even up to the present day. The Freeman’s Bureau was fighting for wages for former slaves, and was generally a force for working class empowerment. Black congressmen were already being voted into office rapidly. If it were left to do its work, it might even have helped to innoculate the Irish- and Italian-Americans against future union busting on Black/White racial lines a few decades down the line.

Instead, after only about a year, Andrew Johnson started fighting and dismantling the Bureau, placing the former slaveowners back into a de facto master/slave relationship with their former slaves, giving the old Southern Democrats back their political power, and generally restoring the status quo as much as possible. The Bureau itself lasted only 5 or 6 years, don’t remember. The KKK rose up because reconstruction wasn’t there anymore to prevent it, because the Democrats wanted so bad to just put all of the states back in the union and go back to bad old days, and so on.

That was never a realistic moment that I know of in American history where people against war with the native tribes of this land had outsized power and influence. Jackson completely ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling was awful, but while the ruling was grounded in good moral and legal principles, it was, like it or not, extremely unpopular. There wasn’t an entire party with a supermajority in Congress that could have kept up the pressure on this issue.

Andrew Jackson was Trail of Tears, but I actually think Andrew Johnson was arguably worse. He was Lincoln’s Democrat vice president (he was brought on to help “balance the ticket” instead of sticking with his strongly abolitionist first term VP Hannibal Hamlin), who started dismantling reconstruction and giving the power back to the former slaveowners.

You can pretty much lay Jim Crow at his feet.

It wouldn’t solve the world’s problems. It would simply make China the preeminent superpower, and cause a horrific environmental (and humanitarian) disaster.

I would be impressed if they risk it. Literally half of Mongolia’s population resides in their capital city Ulaanbaatar. If a country bordering Russia were to arrest the sitting Russian president and turn him over to Copenhagen then there’s a non-zero possibility of a retaliatory airstrike on the capital, destroying their only major city and killing a significant percentage of the entire country’s population.

Good effort. But I don’t know if it will be particularly effective considering Project 2025 has playbook stuff specifically about doing end runs around staffers.

The article is stupid as hell though.

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In 2-3 days the New York Times is going to breathlessly report that Biden called up Netanyahu, scolded him, and gave him yet another ultimatum.

Armorosus Diligentia

I think.

“Early in the Reticulum – thousands of years ago – it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes – a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors – swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millenium A.R.”

“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was sort of a Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus version – bogons, as we call them.”

Excerpt from Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Welcome to the brave new bogon world.

Gwynne Dyer is one of my personal heroes. If you’re unaware, he also made a 7 part documentary series about War that I found shortly after college and was very influential on me.

Ah! Thanks for clearing that up. I understand your point. I’m not certain I agree though. As I wrote to another user downthread:

Maybe ultimately convincing judges to ban nitrogen hypoxia is a good thing over the long run, even if it results in short term harm. But that is not a calculus I feel comfortable solving on behalf of others who will suffer while I remain insulated from the consequences of this decision.

Using the stark, open, and obvious violence of a firing squad might make execution less palatable to the masses, but honestly, when are “the masses” actually exposed to footage of a criminal execution in the United States? We don’t normally film executions, and even when we do, we certainly do not broadcast them. Despite being one of the most carceral nations, typically unless a person has actually personally experienced prison, he or she largely has no idea what even goes on at that level, let alone death row.

I don’t give that. I don’t give it a bit.

I wasn’t aware you were living in a reality where executions aren’t currently happening several times a year.

Here in this timeline, even though there are still executions, thankfully they are on the downswing and hopefully on the way out for good. But at least over the short term, even though every execution deserves to be robustly challenged, activists cannot be expected to win every battle. We also need to plan for what happens if we lose.

States like South Carolina and Idaho have already begun pivoting back to the electric chair and firing squads, and while no anti-capital punishment activist is to blame for it, speaking personally it certainly would not sit right by me to know that I played a part in denying the use of an execution method like nitrogen hypoxia, and the inmate, on whose behalf I was fighting for, wound up dying via electrocution in severe, debilitating pain over the course of 2-15+ minutes instead.

Maybe ultimately convincing judges to ban nitrogen hypoxia is a good thing over the long run, even if it results in short term harm. But that is not a calculus I feel comfortable solving on behalf of others who will suffer while I remain insulated from the consequences of this decision.