I’m also skeptical of mass surveillance laws, but I’m glad NYT posted this article so I could read an opinion from someone who disagrees, and I don’t think this establishes an opinion or stance on the part of NYT at all because it’s not what op-eds are for.
Op-ed pieces are about establishing the Overton Window, not establishing a news agencies position on anything. The fact that the NYT considers this part of a reasonable overton window is embarrassing and honestly revolting.
You know what would keep us safer? If the most prominent news agency in the US actually did its job and did critical journalism instead of acting like RT news.
For example, more intelligence gathering power given to intelligence agencies would not have stopped the Iraq war. If anything, the more power given to these agencies, the more official they sound when they make boldfaced lies because people assume they most know something actually substantiative with all that intelligence capacity.
We would have just launched even faster into the Iraq war.
Which of course is the point
Hell yeah! Go play some videooooo gamesss
I know in steam you can set the order of controllers (player 1, 2, 3, 4) but I can’t remember if you can set controllers to the same player.
At any rate you can map both controllers to output keyboard commands and then have the game receive input from mouse and keyboard and then the game will think it is receiving input from only one device.
Hmm I wonder if antimicrox would allow you to combine two inputs into one composite input, I don’t have experience with it so I can’t say for sure but it seems like the kind of utility that would.
https://github.com/AntiMicroX/antimicrox
What I would do in this situation is map the controls to keyboard, then use a Controller-to-Keyboard mapping program to map all the controller buttons to the keyboard buttons. So map both controllers D-Pads to W-A-S-D (or arrows, or whatever really) then set those keyboard controls to your movement controls in the emulator.
organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.
https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice
All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.
I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?
I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.
An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!
No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.
https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:
Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?
Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.
Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.
If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?
Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.
It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).
NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.
I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/
https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/
The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.
At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.
The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)
It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.
Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.
Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).
I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.
Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.
I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.
We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:
the injustice itself
the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd
the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.
Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.
Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.
I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?
If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.
However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.
Migraines….
…but also… seeing my mom lose all her patience and yell at my dad for having aggressive late stage dementia and not being able to function properly.
Seeing that and being broke and unable to materially change the situation was by far and away the most cynical, insufferable thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and hopefully I will never experience something as awful again or I fear I would shatter into a million pieces.
Precision Murder
Let’s please call it what it is.
Cover it up probably
What really scares me is that Ireland was a prototype for british colonialism and the Palestinian genocide is clearly a similar a prototype, and it terrifies me what it is a prototype for.
Everybody who is cool with Palestinians getting slaughtered like this have no idea that this is a pilot project for authoritarian violence that will be administered in the future and everyone should be terrified because virtually everyone will be a target of it.
What this part?
The only thing that really matters —for aforementioned unaddressed reasons pertaining to the predominantly Democratic voters believing it is genocide — is what swing-voters believe; and if they are undecided or believe Israel is not committing genocide, then they will be the most susceptible to the right-wing propaganda machine that is going to ramp up in the coming months.
Again this is just accepting the rightwing framing that Biden has to tack right to be popular and it is a notion that isn’t supported by evidence in many cases even though it is the prevailing wisdom.
Republicans are going to think Biden is doing a shit job no matter what he does. It’s like trying to make friends with Mitch McConnell and expecting to be able to mediate his positions by appealing to a desire for compromise. It doesn’t work, it just cedes the entire rhetorical conversation to conservatives while trying to appeal to a subset of people who are least likely to be meaningfully swayed.
For the rest of us, we want the genocide to stop now not for Biden to write Netanyahu a strongly worded letter.
For instance, perhaps there are those waiting for the ICC’s verdict.
News flash, we won’t here that verdict until way wayyyyy wayyyyyyyyy after the genocide has already happened and the ruling is simply a matter of getting the history of mass murder right, not a matter of stopping mass murder.
And ultimately: Does anyone here actually believe Biden wants to be associated with Genocide? Is he a homicidal maniac happy to see Palestinians suffer? I don’t get that impression.
Actually there is a lot of indicators that a lot of Biden’s cabinet vehemently disagree with Biden’s policy on the Palestinian genocide, Biden doesn’t want to be associated with genocide but at this point the only reasonable conclusion is that Biden is ideologically committed to Israel in a way that blinds him to empathizing with the Palestinian genocide.
This might be one of Biden’s few ideological positions (as opposed to just calculating the middle and taking that position which a politician like him normally does).
Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.
Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).
It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.
Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!