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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I can see it being a political calculus for the ICC to garner as much support as possible, and not just from their traditional supporters. The stigma that it’s merely a tool, using justice in selective ways to further Western interest, strongly dissuades many 3rd world countries from seeing it as a force of true justice. If the ICC truly seeks to have justice delivered, they cannot rely on just nations like Germany, France, or the UK for support, and they will be strongly crippled if, say, more than half the countries in the world no longer see it as legitimate. So this could be an attempt at sending a message to all nations of what it’s setting out to do, which is good, since even if, like you said, the masks fall off Western nations, there is an entity that can provide other nations with grounds to enact justice for themselves against these forces.


  • I know many will see this as a futile gesture but I’ll try to put out some reasonings that it’s may not be all that futile. The warrant may not do what it sets out to do, which is to put Netanyahu and Gallant in trial and prosecuted, but it will serve itself in other indirect ways.

    It can be political ammunition in diplomatic talks. Nations in support of the Palestinians, many of which are small, can use this to gain some leverage against countries that give no shits about the ICC like the US, however little that is (though given we’re going to have Trump back in the WH, it’s basically pointless). It’s also useful as another ammo for them to back out of unfavorable deals, citing national opinion on the genocide in Gaza.

    Of course, this potentially benefits the ICC as well, though it can certainly go very wrong. Western nations may very well rally behind Israel and pull support off the ICC, further crippling it. So this is hopefully a well-calculated move from the ICC after reading the tea leaves. It can benefit the ICC internationally as it has always been criticized to be pro-Western, and this may help to ease some of their reputation with non-Western nations.

    In a world where cooperation and trust between nations is slowly crumbling, and I may just be trying to be optimistic here because hell knows if that cooperation was ever really a thing, this gesture, however overt, isn’t something we shouldn’t welcome.



  • Having lots of loaned words don’t mean much when English and Japanese have vastly different grammatical structures. There are also lots of non-English loaned words in Japanese, and from experience, the Japanese don’t always know which language a word is borrowed from, nor should the speakers of the language really need to care. In any case, grammar makes up an important part of a language, though it doesn’t come for free if you aren’t already exposed to the grammatical structure before.



  • I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.

    When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.

    For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.

    That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.





  • This seems like a real knee jerk moment here. You aren’t wrong that there are predatory sellers that do exactly that, but it also seems to assume that people do not have the ability to do their own research, which tbf in a society where attention is apparently a rare commodity and heavily capitalized on, it’s not necessarily an unfair assumption. It’s just unhelpful and honestly pretty damn rude to make a blanket comment that seems to assume that people just won’t or will refuse do their research, and should just listen to your authoritative take.

    Wouldn’t it be better to just rephrase your comment into something like, “Please remember to keep an eye on price histories to make sure that the displayed prices are discounted as claimed.”?

    Or does it feel better to speak as if people are dumber than you are? I mean, if you need to feel smarter and better, there are other healthier avenues for that, and I would suggest that you try looking into those instead.








  • As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.


  • I agree with that, and I don’t think what I said alleges that all Jews are Zionists. Mahatir is labelled an antisemite and openly critical of Israel. He claims to have Jewish friends however. Now I don’t agree with this old fart on a lot of things, and I definitely condemn the fact that he’s using the word “Jews” when criticizing Israel and Zionism. But when you have wealthy Jewish organizations actively lobbying for Zionism in one if not the most powerful nation on Earth to continue facilitating the horrors that we see playing out in the Middle East with no intention or desire of stopping, even when their own people are dying in the process, I find it hard to disagree that these Zionsists aren’t in control of the world to some extent.