The Indian family down the street is great, but when I can’t cook a nice daal in my Instant Pot because the power’s out then my racist jimmies are rustled.

YOU CAN HAVE MY COBOL ON COGS WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.

Sure we can. Given the choice, a small percentage of people in a poll will always pick the worst answer. Is Hitler still alive, living in Argentina, and I want to give him a real nice blow job? 5% say yes, yes, and yes.

Via the Brennan Center. Elected judges are more punitive and more likely to rule against defendants.

The problem is that the judges often use their decisions to campaign instead of simply applying the law. So they might give an unpopular criminal defendant a harsher sentence to look tough on crime or even tilt a trial against an innocent defendant. Not that doesn’t happen with judges that are appointed by the executive, but it’s usually not as bad.

I’m not too surprised. It must be quite unpleasant working around a noisy piece of machinery like that.

During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

Well Mr. Trump, if you hadn’t dragged your heels for years, this wouldn’t still be going during the election.

So I started actually looking up numbers and they indeed look good from certain sources, but I’m still giving them the side eye. For instance, the CDC shows Mississippi as having the #1 murder rate among the states in 2022.

Or they ain’t so gud at countin’.

This is under French law, though, and it’s cyberbullying law instead of defamation.

They’ve tried. Didn’t work out well. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, I’m not sure what’s been decided is misinformation.

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

You get a lèse-majesté and you get a lèse-majesté!

On the plus side, they don’t send people to prison over having walkie-talkies like in Myanmar, so… win?

Ah, it’s all good. This discussions can be a little hard to follow in terms of who is responding to who.

Okay, what requires more assumptions:

Biden goes along with a hair brained Trump era plan with a nebulous link to the Trump administration. News media sources have found no link to any official agency, but fortunately we have social media to discover a link (based on nothing). Biden then goes on to prosecute the perpetrators for weapons smuggling. None of the perpetrators complains about a deal being broken.

OR

This only had links to political figures in the Trump administration, but not anyone in the intelligence services. Those figures are long gone. No one bothered to tell Biden on the way out the door. Biden is prosecuting the perpetrators of an operation he allowed for fun and they’re happy to stay quiet while they get imprisoned for running weapons.

All it said is that this group that was not part of the US government was in touch with someone in the Trump administration. That could be literally anyone, likely some Trump sycophant. The Trump administration leaves, attempts a coup on the US presidency on the way out, and now whoever was in contact is probably gone. Then the incoming Biden administration doesn’t even know this bullshit is going on, let alone who’s supposed to be contacted to call this thing quits. Now that same administration is prosecuting them for running weapons.

First, the definition of appeal to authority, since it’s one of the most misunderstood fallacies. Citing someone based on their area of expertise is not appeal to authority. The problem is when you cite the stated opinion of someone, but their area of expertise is not directly relevant to that opinion. I’m a software developer, I could give you an expert opinion on various topics in that area. But outside of topics I am an export on, appeal to authority.

I didn’t say he’s necessarily wrong. But at the same time, he got his Nobel prize by being an economist who made a substantial contribution to economics. He is not an expert on fascism. His expert opinions in economics often run counter to many other credible expert economists, so you should consider those other expert opinions as well and not just listen to the person who tells you want you want to hear. That’s certainly not anti-intellectual.

Experts and intellectuals should absolutely be considered to better understand a subject, but they’re not some infallible oracle of truth. They contradict each other, are often limited by an ivory tower environment, and operating in the same societal context as everyone else.