So the difference is not whether they’re trying to be imperialists, but in their relative ability to do so. I’m sure there’s some fascinating and useful graduate level historical analysis to be done in understanding why Russification was relatively unsuccessful, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russia has time and again attempted to impose Russian culture, Russian language, and Russian law on parts of the Russian empire that were very happily doing their own thing.

lolwut

Yeah, though in his (incredibly lukewarm) defense he seemed more interested in the batshit crazy aliens-control-the-government theories than the more pedestrian conservative stuff, although the line between the two has greatly narrowed over the years.

So when Ukrainians try to push for closer alignment with the EU it’s a Washington-backed color revolution and thus is no different than Russia rolling into the literal tanks.

Like, even if you’re not a Russian troll you’re still adopting a conspiracy theory that completely ignores any agency the Ukrainian people have.

How are you holding them accountable when one of them is still going to be in power? You’re just sacrificing one of the few concrete mechanisms you have to actually make things better. Yeah, a Harris victory doesn’t mean immediate victory in the fight against this atrocity, but a Trump election does mean defeat.

Obligatory plug for calcgpt

I feel like there’s a “law as it currently exists” thing versus the ideal. The law as it currently exists makes it illegal to discriminate based on content. This has historically been an important vector for, say, allowing civil rights activists to send essays to be published in newspapers. But much as it was illegal to deny a gay couple their marriage license, it ought be somehow made illegal to spread damaging lies about trans people in order to stir up a hate campaign.

In this case I’d say that 5 days fully paid suspension is probably an appropriate consequence for this rule-breaking, and could only be made more appropriate if it actually included tickets to spend those days someplace warmer and friendlier than that part of Canada and a knowing wink from the postmaster general.

I want to know when that report was filed. “I can’t find my cat, therefore my Haitian neighbors stole it to eat” is the kind of statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged, unless the idea was already in the water supply because a vice presidential candidate was saying it in interviews ahead of a national debate.

A police report would mark a diversion from the usual pattern of these things where Trump surrogates talk a big game about the massive conspiriacies against them (and therefore against You, the hypothetical American voter) to the media, but if they ever end up in front of a court or a police report or something where lying may have actual consequences they back off hard. How many times did we hear about all the mountains of evidence they had of voter fraud in 2020, and how many of the resulting court cases include those same lawyers specifically saying “we do not allege voter fraud” when the judge asks about it.

In other news, Germany should be allowed to keep half of Poland and the Sudetenland.

We don’t do right of conquest anymore because we recognized how it obviously incentivizes more wars of aggression and the associated humanitarian disasters.

And those people are being told that the moderators were lugenpresse who were on the wrong side and want to protect criminals over your dog as part of their something something woke. The fact that the lamestream media keeps talking about how false it is and going to increasingly desperate lengths to deny it must mean we’re onto them.

This is how the propaganda works. This is such a blatant lie that it should be a simple fact-check, but since that doesn’t actually change anyone’s mind all the attempt does is keep everyone talking about immigration, an issue that fires up the right-wing base and exhausts a lot of their opponents. You’re absolutely right that we shouldn’t be still talking about whether this is true or not, but focusing on how weird and dumb this conspiracy theory is getting. That’s why the “weirdo” tack has been working for Harris in this campaign, and it’s unfortunate that the headlines have lost interest.

Possibly fair. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I’m not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.

There’s a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.

Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.

And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Actually one of the few political pressures Putin has had to deal with internally has been preventing conscripts from fighting outside of Russian territory, which has included not sending them into the supposedly-annexed oblasts in the east. They’ve had to make do with massive signing bonuses, prison recruitment, stop loss, and PMCs to make up the manpower shortage. Definitely some high-pressure tactics in use, but no actual use of legal force. Unless this video was taken on the Kursk front then any Russian soldiers who this was targeting had signed contracts that they could have chosen not to.

Speaking as the father of a 4-year-old girl, there definitely is. Not that I disagree in principle, but it’s probably a bad example.

Yeah, mate. This is the most credible source I can find and it’s literally about how impossible it is to actually use crypto without tying yourself to the wallet somehow.

The exchange where you traded BTC for USD, which had to comply with AML and KYC laws in order to have access to the US banking system in the first place.

Like, it’s theoretically possible to work with perfect operational security and never ever link your Bitcoin address to the real world, but doing so basically precludes you from doing anything in the real world with it, including buying crypto in the first place.

It also fits in with the wider pattern of calling the opposition out for their weirdness and pettiness. A subtle “you all remember the tan suit thing, right?” as well as bait for another unforced error.

This is broadly true, though there can be some wiggle room in the exact definitely of “immediate life-saving care” depending on where you end up. In particular, a condition like appendicitis that will inevitably lead to a crisis may be turned away until it actually becomes one, even if that makes things riskier and costlier for everyone involved.

Even Yanukovich had been trying to push for EU membership, AKA the guy who was the target of the so-called coup you’re bitching about. He had to shift gears when Putin’s attitude changed and he could no longer split the two, but the whole “euro” part of Euro Maidan was about the sudden shift away from the EU.