Arotrios

“I ever tell you about the time my buddy Keith and I were on the top of a burnin’ building, and we had to fight our way down like five floors of zombies and― Hey, wait a second…I guess that was you guys. Oh, shit, man, I can’t wait to tell Keith about that one!”

I rewatched this recently, and yeah, all the cliches are there (some rather clumsily filmed even by 40s standards) - but fuck me if Bogie still doesn’t blow it out of the water with that performance. I can’t think of a single film noir protagonist that matches what he pulled off in that film. He’s better here than he is in Casablanca by a long shot imho.

In theory they can, but it’s very unlikely, as it requires a 2/3rds majority in both the Assembly and the Senate. One of the things I severely dislike about California politics is that the Governor’s veto power is near absolute in practice. On top of that this state has an entrenched political machine that has invested in Newsom since he ran for Mayor of San Francisco - and many in Sacramento owe their careers to him. There’s no realistic chance any of these vetoes get overridden.

Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don’t fuck up my state to do it.

You’ve done ok in CA when you’ve kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown’s footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you’re an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren’t even your constituents yet.

You see, according to Cocteau’s plan I’m the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body reading playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I’ve SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing “I’m an Oscar Meyer Wiener”.

Agreed. I’d also like to add that intelligence != wisdom != experience, and you need all three to achieve real understanding.

我可能發布了 XI 的視訊聊天記錄…

I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There’s plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what’s led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub’s subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

抱歉 - 這可能是我的錯

Find your representative by zip code here

Came here to say the same. Lieberman is a snake, and has been using his position as the 2000 VP Dem nominee to undermine progressive policy for more than two decades. I have no doubt he’s been bought and paid for by the GOP, I’m guessing right around the time he started rooting for the Iraq war (he was the biggest supporter on the Dem side at the time).

TIL Mozilla has a mastodon server. Have an upvote.

Stop. My face hurts from all the palming.

I watch the Watchmen.

See, by posting this, I’m on the watchlist too. So the watchlist is watching the watchmen watching the watchlist watching the watchmen ad infinitum. If you’re asking “watch the fuck?”, to explain without using the word watch, I’ve engaged an infinite mobius surveillance loop.

Side note, by making it to the bottom of this comment, you’ve all done Dr. Seuss proud.

This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven’t done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn’t surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

Actually Kbin is great for tracking shitheads, which is why I’m able to call this guy out. Downvotes are visible on the activity tab of each post and comment, and this troll loves downvote spam - as you can see, he downvoted my comment above. He’s the kind that will stalk your account and downvote everything to try and get your attention.

In general, 99.9% of the community here is awesome, and there’s a lot of support between users here. It’s actually the best experience I’ve had online in many years (and I’ve been online since the early 90s). One of my goals in calling out the trolls when they decide to target me is to keep the community enjoyable, as I’m quite certain I’m not their only intended victim.

You’ve got one on kbin too - @some_guy - a racist, bigoted fascist who likes to obsessively troll people and try to dox them.

It took me a moment to determine whether or not you were the same person, but unlike him, you can speak in complete sentences. As such, I thought I’d give you and @someguy3 a heads up that your good names are being dragged through the mud.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

Was Obama a dictator?

Clearly not from the context of the article you provided, as they describe how the cages were part of an expansion to a larger facility that corrected a worse detention situation at the border, where there was no air conditioning. Do I think this was a humane design choice? No, but it was an improvement. At the time they were built, family separation wasn’t performed except in extreme circumstances. Nor do I think that Obama was personally involved in the design decisions.

Trump undid that policy, and filled the cages that Obama built. Family separation was the point. And again and again he bragged about it. He was personally involved in the decision, and lauded it.

The Biden administration is still detaining children, but they’ve drastically reduced the number (see the graph on the article provided), and no longer enforces family separation to my knowledge. More work needs to be done here, I agree, but ignoring the scope to say both he and Trump are the same is lazy thinking.

From a purely leftist standpoint (far left in the US), you’re right - the electoral process and two party system as they currently exist will never allow a true progressive to set policy, and we’re stuck in a cycle of choosing between bad and worse. It’s my hope ranked choice voting starts getting some real traction as a counter, but I’m not holding my breath.

So why should you care?

Because in a choice between bad and worse, if you don’t vote, you end up with worse.

Dictators get elected all the time, Hitler being the one most historians refer to. It’s the policies they implement after election that define them as dictators. Trump began the process while in office, but was horribly incompetent at it, as demonstrated by his flailing coup attempt. Moreover, he didn’t have Hitler’s popular support, effectively getting into office on a technicality.

Biden was elected by both the popular and electoral vote. His policies thus far, while centrist, have been built on bi-partisan cooperation where possible, and he’s been as hands off as possible regarding the political elements of the court cases against Trump. He’s also been supportive of civil rights, and has rolled back a number of Trump’s crueler policies.

The same cannot be said of Trump, nor will it be. You can actually boil it down to one definitive action: Dictators lock children in cages.

Trump qualifies under this definition, having been responsible for the detainment of over 500,000. Biden doesn’t qualify under this definition, nor any other. At worst, he’s a middling centrist who is most concerned with keeping the country running, as a President should be.

As to the legitimacy of America’s electoral process, I absolutely agree that it needs to be reinforced, but I don’t believe that there was any substantial fraud in the 2020 election.

I would ideally like to see all voting machines require paper trails, and have universal mail-in voting, as it’s been a resounding success in OR and CA. I would also like to see a restructuring of the electoral college that more accurately reflects the popular vote while still allowing rural areas to have a significant voice - after all, urban needs can easily override rural ones to the detriment of all citizens. In a perfect world, that balance would also be properly reflected in Senate seats, to more properly represent the country as a whole.