Yeah i agree - states are institutions dedicated to violence. Whether or not they did some arcane legal rituals before murdering iranians and americans is hardly the point.

But i do think it matters to show that the state is lying when it claims to use violence legitimately. It doesn’t even adher to its own made up rules.

And it matters that their violence is so unpopular that they can’t even let a body as unrepresentative as the US congress get a say.

The Greens senator David Shoebridge called the prime minister’s claim that no Australian personnel were involved in offensive action “extraordinary” and said it was inevitable that Australian personnel would be involved in US action.

“This makes Australia obviously, clearly, unambiguously, part of an illegal war, part of a war that is breaking down the norms of international law and making the world a less safe place,” he said.

“It is as sure as day follows night that Australians throughout the US military are actively involved, part of the United States and Israel’s illegal war in Iran.” … According to the Royal Australian Navy, one in 10 crew members onboard US Navy attack submarines is Australian.

1 in 10 is a lot!

Hired goons?

How much of our air defensive stockpile do you think our russia backed regime can expend protecting the wealth of the royal house of saud?

Inflation is also just intentionally caused by tech oligarchs like amazon and rental market monopolists raising prices on everything because they can. So it’s bound to go up because bezos doesn’t have enough money.

“Gambles his presidency?” My god the nyt is such trash.

We’re in an era of rising authoritarianism, with an illegitimate regime that refuses to obey the law, is openly committed to voter suppresion, openly engages in corruption including with foreign nationals, runs concentration camps and is lead by a known child rapist.

And yet the nyt talks like the political rules of 2006 still apply.

Bombable locations often have air raid sirens to alert personnel to seek shelter.

A “tactical operation center that was fortified” ought to have such a thing, whereas a “makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait” is much less likely to.

The lack of warning speaks to the lies and poor planning of hegseth and other regime goons.

I don’t think it’s the friendship he wants people to stop talking about though, i suspect it’s all the children he raped.

“Only I stole this fairly” has been the motto of oligarchs for millenia.

No good outcome is possible from two brutal murdeous authoritarian regimes attacking a third.

There was a solid, enforcable, internationally recognized deal that all credible experts agree was working and keeping iran’s nuclear industry civilian. Whatever happened to that?

several incidents of this kind have been reported, including two in 2022. In one case, a speedboat coming from the United States fired on Cuban Border Guard forces near Villa Clara, injuring a Cuban officer.

The other incident took place in Bahía Honda, in western Cuba, when a vessel also coming from the United States collided with an Interior Ministry patrol boat, causing the U.S. craft to sink and killing several of its occupants.

Authorities on the island frequently report finding abandoned or seized speedboats along the northern coast (Ciego de Ávila, Villa Clara, Havana), commonly used to pick up potential migrants. They describe these operations as “territorial violations and human trafficking.”

But I don’t do anything unless prompted by a human.

It’s crazy but not surprising that the cowardly NYT would have an article this long about this many links to epstein and his island without any acknowledgemwnt that these men almost certainly raped children. Bill gates without a doubt did.

Theres probably variation from the background there, that drives clicks to that particular spot. Several of the red-female locations have blue-male dots at the same spot.

It’s probably 1 click = blue, right? The more clicks overlap at a certain point the closer to red.

I worked in a phone room of a large drug company. By early 2021 we had AI agents making phone calls to insurance companies to confirm basic insurance coverage details. They only handled the “no surprises” kind of plans - so a limited set of expected answers. They would encounter something unexpected and pass off to a human maybe 10-15% of the time.

But within their limits, they did what a human did. It was recognizably AI to most listeners, but vocal tone, probing for clarity, getting all the info - the output was like listening to the output an experienced human agent.

There’s a credible argument that we’re just strongly overestimating what consciousness is.

I don’t think AI is conscious. But it processes information and comes up with an output that’s often dumb, obvious or not really on topic and then rarely kinda cool - just like humans do. It doesn’t have a will, but most experts agree that free will is scientifically impossible, even if many think we should just pretend that it’s real. AI doesn’t have the feeling of subjective experience, but that’s not really very important - we could still see a red light, understand what it means and execute appropriate bevahiour if we lacked the subjective experience of seeing the color red.

AI is not conscious, similarly to how a ventilator is not human lungs. It’s not, but it’s still doing mostly the same thing.

My favorite UFO explanation is that it was largely a ploy to waste the USSR’s money. They’ll have to expend more resources chasing down a red herring than it takes us to lie about it. No coincidence then, that as a near-peer competitor emerges again we get UAPs.

“I’ll release some BS we made up” is incredibly appropriate as a desperate distraction.

This misunderstands the situation.

Most of the conservative majority on the court are active participants in the ongoing fascist coup, probably a few are just committed sympathizers.

This isn’t the supreme court enforcing the law against the president, this is a disagreement between factions within the regime about the priorities and direction.