It was literally a case of the writers going, “What would be the most annoying outcome of technological progress? Let’s write that!” and tech guys going “Zomg guys! Wouldn’t it be cool if computers and society were so cyberpunk, I loved those books!”

I will go out on a limb here as someone who has been diagnosed with ‘unclassified impulse control issues’ (I didn’t really know how to keep my mouth shut and emotions in check), but is now just considered ‘abnormal but we trust you to medicate yourself properly’ which is a weird place to be in, while there may be an element of ableism in there, a large part of it comes from the fact that these people are on the very low end of the spectrum of their anxiety disorders and yet have found a way through self-medication to trigger and intensify it in themselves.

If they were higher on the spectrum with it, it likely would have triggered earlier, and they would be more self-conscious from having to deal with it when they were younger. This is, of course, assuming they had access to mental health care at all. The fact of the matter is that they are absolutely correct to be paranoid. We are being passively observed, usually illegally, and our data is then used to feed us content and products all the time, tapping into our greatest insecurities and FOMO to do so. Most anxiety-ridden people I know are anxiety-ridden because they have full understanding of this at all times and it absolutely paralyzes them, with the most common one I have personally witnessed being someone having a literal mental breakdown over choice and calorie anxiety from a fast food menu. Which they are correct to be anxious over because too much of that stuff is definitely bad for you. For myself, massive anxiety hits whenever I enter a big city, because it suddenly dawns on me that there are hundreds of thousands, of not millions of people living there, most of whom will never be aware of me nor I of them.

In this way, this kind of LLM induced anxiety is both stupid in its creation and ableist in not having sympathy despite the stupidity of it. TLDR: It can be both.

This is because people in this site are basically reactionary to libertarians (which I get it, see user name). Age of consent and other associated laws should exist and be enforced because of the potential for wild power dynamic imbalances and abuse.

However, there is absolutely no material basis for the idea that ‘maturity’ and ‘adulthood’ is specifically tied to any age past 13-14 when the physical maturation process kicks in. I have known incredibly ‘immature’ 40 year olds (who can’t be trusted with simple tasks) who are clearly in some form of arrested development and very ‘mature’ (in that they very seriously think and plan for the future based on the information available to them, to a almost comical degrees) 13 year olds. However, it is clear to me that much of that ‘maturity’ comes from their ability to parrot the arguments of their parents, teachers, and role-models, not their actual understanding of situations. Which is fine, they are kids, I don’t have that expectation. My point is that tying these nebulous cultural concepts to a specific age, or even ‘brain development’, which is itself a very poorly understood field, is ridiculous.

My second point is that because of this healthcare of any kind should not be barred by these concepts either, and certainly not by age. Erecting artificial barriers to professional care will only lead to people seeking amateur care which has the potential to create more danger for individuals seeking treatment.

That said, if you are part of a trans activist group, now would be good time to begin attempting to coordinate with groups in PR, supplying individuals with the latest scientific medical advice and material. What cannot be won in the courts and legislature must therefore be won on the streets.

All I will say is this.

Let’s ignore for a moment, the policies and morals of imperialism, and just address the situation purely from a self-interested perspective.

The army isn’t ‘just another job’, it is a four year contract, literally signing away 4 years of your life to, for most people, do a dead-end job that you would do in civilian life for significantly less pay, under management structures created by the most authoritarian people in the world, where power and its exercise is literally the only thing that matters.

Want to go to college while in the military? Too bad, only so many can go and you aren’t friends with the military administrator who makes that decision (unless he thinks he can hack the marines, they get to do college in the service). The reason for that is that the modern military is very top heavy, and they always need more grunts to do grunt work. If he is lucky he might just get to be a mechanic, where he will still be in a daily battle with administrators to get basic supplies, because of military contractor graft, and still won’t be qualified to work on civilian cars when he gets out. But more likely he will essentially be a truck driver/loader, a job that he could do in the U.S. economy for quite a bit of money, CDLs are always in demand. Every path the military for the non-degreed and unconnected is either an exaggeration, or there is a civilian equivalent that isn’t that difficult to break into if you have access to a technical college.

Morr than anything, joining the military without a very specific plan and connections is just placing a hold on your life, to be restarted with some horrific stress injury and maybe even some PTSD. It is one of the only options available that pretty much immediately eliminates four years of your life with basically no ability to pivot to something else. It is an arresting of choice, not an expansion of it.

They did. They just learned the wrong things.

Their first assumption was that Ukraine wouldn’t fight back because most Russian (and Eastern Ukrianian) civilians consider them to ‘brother-peoples’. In that way, they were legitimately able to take Crimea not only without a fight, but also without really any amount of internal resistance. Due to the general corruption of the Ukrianian government, they figured it would basically be the same deal, with them coming in as ‘saviors’. In addition to this, they definitely believed the story of Desert Storm “Large mobile convoy with air support is able rush forward quickly to obliterate Iraq’s army.” without taking into account the two things that actually made it successful (which of course worked in Iraq but not Afghanistan due to the country being far less centralized, this also worked on Libya and Syria and to some extent Iran) which was, sanctions to impoverish the society and wide scale bribery to military officers with promises of clemency in the new administration to abandon their posts.

Russia did not perform sanctions on Ukraine even as they were in the middle of a low scale ethnic civil war, and this were not able to bribe a sufficient number of Ukrianian officers. It especially was not effective as cutouts in the U.S. have been bribing the Ukrianian government and military with funding and weapons for years, with promises of continued support if they sustained their aggressive ethnic policies towards ethnic Russian Ukrainians, and support if conflict ensued (even though no one in the Ukrainian government actually thought they were going to launch an assault on the country). Therefore, it was not, and could not be effective, and Russia fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their relationship with Ukraine.

I will object that the reason that I am dismissive of them is that a large number of them are actively hostile towards AES states, communist, and anarchist theory, with many of them spending their time misrepresenting our “tankie” positions and arguments, usually by repeating Western propaganda as if it is decided history that should inform our decisions.

The idea that any of us who consider ourselves anti-imperialist should view them as anything other than an overall hostile online entity is beyond me. I view it as yet another demonstration of overall lack of media literacy.

This person has already lost and they know it. As soon as someone says “We could get into it, but I don’t really want to because I don’t actually care that much. After all, I am just a third party observer and don’t have any biases.” and then continues to post defensively has already decisively lost the argument, because they are already lying to you.

You wouldn’t have been summarily executed for not keeping your mouth shut unless the things you were saying were things like what the Nazis were saying, or, you know, actually participating in genocide or acts of war?

Your friend is a loudmouth know-nothing, unfortunately.

Correct other than the fact that plastic is not, in fact, cheap.

Yeah, sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it is an ignorant New Yorker interviewing celebrities who, also either being or mostly residing in NY, are also incredibly ignorant of things outside of NY.

Like I saw one person confidently state that Mobile, Alabama is a ‘small town’, when it is nearly 200,000 people. It has been genuinely over a decade since I lived in a city of over 100,000 people, and I know the difference between those and ‘small towns’.

A better question is why you would take anything Richard Bernstein says seriously? He was literally one of the prime purveyors of the myth of ‘China killed hundreds of students in Tienamin Square’, plastering the claim throughout the New York Times and other newspaper publications without evidence for years, and crying ‘authoritarian cover-up’ when the historical evidence didn’t actually reveal his story to be true. As well, he was among the first liberal critics of ‘multiculturalism’ and was an obvious American exceptionalist.

To this, I would suggest that Bernstein is knowing he is being flippant, as if he was a serious scholar (which he was not) and not just an Ivy League educated propagandist for the NYT rebranded as a ‘scrappy hard nosed truth teller’, he would know he is actually under the obligation to prove that other companies have just as much responsibility for the Holocaust as IBM. If he disagrees, he is under the obligation to provide sources for his disagreement. None of his 10 books actually address this issue, which means he did not. As such there is no reason to take his criticism as anything other than another flippant book review from the New York Crimes.

I doubt Russia would be able to help them all that much in a conflict with the West even at full strength. At most they would be a safer place to get resources, which again, the more isolated they are from the world the more likely that is to happen, and at least they would be able to maintain their airspace which would protect China’s northern border.

I just don’t envision a scenario where Russia’s lack of involvement is the make or break for China, and I would bet that China sees that as well. I don’t think it is short-sighted, it is another case of risk v.s. rewards v.s. consequences engineering thinking, where the rewards do not outweigh the risks involved or potential consequences of failure.

And this is besides the fact that I don’t think Russia, particularly the Russian military, is very interested in direct military coordination with the Chinese or Chinese soldiers on Russian soil.

Ideally China would turn some of its over-production towards making Russian equipment, or modifying Chinese equipment for Russian use, but I also don’t think the Chinese or Russians are that interested in that kind of cooperative technology agreement, as they are direct market competitors in that regard.

It’s not a self-own unless you assume global communism is literally a few conflicts away.

I mean, they hinted at why. While China cannot afford a Russian loss, it can afford a Russian stalemate. Moreover, the longer they are in a stalemate, the longer the U.S. focuses and commits resources to that stalemate and not towards China.

I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like Wang is trying to get the EU to commit more into the Russian conflict, with the idea that it hurts China, when, in reality, it just isolates and pushes Russia deeper into the Chinese sphere of influence.

I only say this because I can’t imagine he actually thought that this would work to get them to stop commiting to the ‘Russia is the ultimate hilterite evil’ bit. If he did, then he is a grade-a idiot.

If the scratches are invisible to the naked eye, then there is nothing that can be done on the manufacturing line, there is going to be too much random variation to fix that. The option would have to be getting rid of any plastic altogether in the design room, which likely would shorten the length of product shelf life to an unacceptable degree for these products.

The only thing they learn from our critiques is to bastardize and emulate our language.

I’m not too familiar with the combat sports scene, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something similar is going on. That said, those guys tend to be a whole other level of insane, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t necessarily doing PEDs, especially since technique is such a huge portion of what is going on there. But on the other other hand, even stuff like caffeine before a match could be considered a PED, and fighters do love their little advantages and then covering it up with talk of ‘superior genetics’.

I mean the same thing exists for me and workout influencers, since I enjoy working out and keeping limber, and they usually have some decent tips. Again, not all of them are going to be on them, but it is a much larger number than you’d expect. The ones you have to be suspect of are the ones that are constantly breaking their PRs and could be in contention for WR categories, but never seem to actually want to compete, or ones that repeatedly go through aggressive weight-gain/loss regimes. Guys who are slimmer and tend to just stay the same weight over long periods of time, while improving their techniques and flexibility are less sus. But it’s the extreme ones that gain the most attention. Even then it’s mostly a supplements or training regime scam at the end of the day. I know I will never look like them without PEDs but I know that I feel better when I try, move, do things and eat healthier.

Idk, I think the better thing to do is just to tune as much of it out as possible and just ask yourself, ‘Am I having fun? Do I enjoy this, even if the implications are bad?’ and if you don’t then find something where PEDs will never be as important as just time spent and technique, like dancing, music or other forms of art (including research and writing).

These are great insights! Thanks!

Yeah, as Russia didn’t intervene, there were a lot of people who thought they should try to stay as independent oblasts, and not connect themselves up with Russia. Pre-intervention the civil war was still occuring though.

I think it’s mostly due to the stigmatization of needle drugs as somehow being worse for you overall than orally or nasally administered drugs, even though they all can kill you pretty easily if you take the wrong dosage. My point is more that given what athletes especially professional athletes out themselves through on a regular basis, needles aren’t really considered to be a big deal in the clique.

See, and this is where you can have an actually constructive criticism of Stalin, as he was a big believer in pushing the national sovereignty of ethnic peoples because he was an ethnic Georgian, despite no one fighting longer or harder against forces of reaction. It was a blind spot in his theory that was created by his own personal experience under Russian chauvinism, but it was also supported by Lenin’s theories of political maneuvering and it was these kinds of ideas that bound him closer to Stalin than Trotsky, who was much more inclined towards Luxembourg’s ideas.

But it does lead us to ask, if the Bolsheviks didn’t give up their claim to inherit the Russian empire, would Rosa have just decried them as another imperialist? I only say this because much of her theories appear to simply be monday morning quarterbacking to Bolshevik ideas that actually got to be implemented, after all, today we could just as easily point towards the Balkans as a proof that not giving people their own national identities eventually leads to another kind of destruction and reactionary uprising, where the proletariat are easily pitted against each other by the ethnic bourgeois under ‘freedom from communist tyranny’. I think the national/ethnic question is an incredibly difficult question to answer, and it will take more than simply pitting 20th century revolutionaries against each other.

I am convinced that most star basketball players are on PEDs (LeBron especially sweats and acts like he is on anabolics, but it could just be because he is old) at least that help them ignore pain, because injuries in star basketball players used to be related to chronic knee and ankle pain which would force them to sit out for multiple minutes, but not generally devastating ligament injuries. I think it also can lead to side effects like distracted thinking, which is why Hallie would just essentially mentally drop out of games every now and then, though that could just be him playing through pain too.