Plenty of people, even right here on Lemmy.

A cat and a Blahaj? This girl’s got her life together.

Considering there was a trans woman who got elected as a county sheriff in New Hampshire a few years ago while running a “defund the police” campaign because she was the only one to run as a Republican candidate and nobody bothered to do their homework before voting for every R on the ballot, I’d say chances are pretty good.

I was going to say, “Didn’t this happen when he was in office too?” because I was getting serious deja vu, but then I started reading the article and it turns out that they’re talking about the same incident.

We already knew this, but it’s good to remind people with all the absurdities that occur every day that this nutjob is still alive.

The Nazis were super into Norse runes. Hitler legitimately thought that they held magical powers.

I’d say I’m surprised you didn’t know that, but honestly, I’m not because there’s a lot of those kinds of things that they don’t mention when teaching about WW2. Plenty of skinhead dog whistles that I didn’t learn about until later on.

A boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into, so it checks out.

Clearly. They are the same picture, after all.

This just in: 1 in 5 Republicans are openly sedititious traitors.

And from my anecdotal experience, lockdowns varied greatly locally as well. We had what I would call “rolling lockdowns” here, where a town might close restaurants and stuff for a few weeks before opening back up while neighboring towns would have mask mandates only. Some would go as far as total lockdowns, and many almost never had an actual lockdown. And it was all based on the waves of COVID infections. Towns would only act once they hit a certain threshold of daily infections.

I had a job during lockdown where I had a form stating I could drive on the state highways for work and up near the major city I might see 4 or 5 cars on the road when there should’ve been rush hour traffic, but in my town the only businesses that really closed were bars and restaurants, and that was only until they started adding outdoor seating and plexiglass walls between tables.

And then you had stuff like a girl I know posting pictures of herself drinking in a packed bar in South Carolina at the height of COVID, not a single mask in sight.

I thought he meant the circles of Hell and just lost count. Either way, he thought they were beautiful, and he’s sad that they couldn’t fill them up!

The idea that the world united against the horrible atrocities of the Nazis is post-war propaganda. Your average person didn’t know anything about what was going on until photos of the camps made their way home as we pushed into Germany itself. Most countries didn’t give a shit about the Nazis until they were on their doorstep. Most people said, “Hitler’s only saying that stuff to get elected. Once he’s in office, he’ll calm down, you’ll see.” And then they said, “Well, if we leave him alone, then he won’t bother us.”

Many people across Europe and North America actually agreed with Hitler’s views about the Jews before “The Final Solution.” Antisemitism was common across Europe and North America, if not the globe. In Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to America as the sisterland across the ocean that shares his values.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” was used by the pro-isolationism political group the America First Committee, who formed in 1940 and dissolved after the attack on Pearl Harbor, who largely opposed support for the UK. And they had over 800,000 members from all different backgrounds (from Democrats and Republicans to communists and anti-communists) with major tones of antisemitism and pro-fascist support amongst its leaders and speakers. They dissolved 4 days after Pearl Harbor and joined the war effort, not to fight the Nazis but to protect the US.

The Nazis were inspired by the treatment of Native Americans when they started their camps, and we had our own camps for Japanese Americans. We hated the Chinese when they came here, and we hated the Irish as well. Most ethnic groups coming to the US settled in communities of their own culture from their homeland. That’s why the culture is so varied here, even across a single state. To quote somebody else, “Racism is as American as apple pie, and some people will see hatred of the first as hatred of the second.”

I remember the days after 9/11, when attacks on black people doubled, attacks on Jews tripled, and Muslim parents were asking their kids if they wanted to change their name to something more American to avoid being bullied. That racism has always been present. It was just often couched in the lie of being edgy jokes or just that one racist uncle at the family party. The biggest differences today are that they’re no longer afraid to say it openly, and the number of young men caught up in the rhetoric of the online fascist pipeline that gives them a target to blame all the problems in their life on. The ironic racist jokes of their teen and childhood years stopped being ironic at some point and became their actual beliefs.

I was talking about this with my dad not long ago. My Bernie supporting liberal dad was talking about how “patriotic” the country was after 9/11 and how awful all these MAGA maniacs are today. I was in middle school when 9/11 happened, but I told him what I remembered from that time was how attacks on Jews tripled overnight, attacks on Blacks doubled, and attacks on Muslims were so bad that parents were asking their kids if they wanted to change their name to something more American sounding.

America has always been like this. They just hid it behind a veneer of “it’s just a joke.”

We’re already living in a dystopia. Companies are selling your work to be used in training sets already. Every social media company that I’m aware of has already tried it at least once, and most are actively doing it. Though that’s not why we live in a dystopia, it’s just one more piece on the pile.

When I say licensing, I’m not talking about licensing fees like social media companies are already taking in, I’m talking about open source software style licensing - groups of predefined rules that artists can apply to their work that AI companies must abide by if they want to use their work. Under these licensing rules are everything from “do whatever you want with my code” to “my code can only be used to make not-for-profit software,” and all derivative works have the same license applied to them. Obviously, the closed source alternative doesn’t apply here - the d’jinn’s already out of the bottle and as you said, once your work is out there, there’s always the risk somebody is going to steal it.

I’m not against AI, I’m simply against corporations being left unregulated to do whatever the hell they want. That’s one of the reasons to make the distinction between people taking inspiration from a work and a LLM being trained off of analysing that work as part of its data set. Profit-motivation is largely antithetical to progress. Companies hate taking risks. Even at the height of corporate research spending, the so-called Blue Skies Research, the majority of research funding was done by the government. Today, medical research is done at colleges and universities on government dollars, with companies coming in afterward to patent a product out of the research when there is no longer any risk. This is how AI companies currently work. Letting people like you and me do all the work and then swooping in to take that and turn it into a multi-billion dollar profit. The work that made the COVID vaccines possible was done decades before, but no company could figure out how to make a profit off of it until COVID happened, so nothing was ever done with it.

As for walled off communities of artists, you should check out Cara, a new social media platform that’s a mix of Artstation and Instagam and 100% anti-AI. I forget the details, but AI art is banned on the site, and I believe they have Nightshade or something built in. I believe that when it was first announced, they had something like 200,000 people create accounts in the first 3 months.

People aren’t anti-AI. They’re anti late-stage capitalism. And with what little power they have, they’d rather poison the well or watch it all burn than be trampled on any further.

I came in to say something similar about it being in other organs. I remember a study being done where they found COVID in guys’ testicles, potentially causing fertility issues. And I remember it because I remember thinking, “Maybe they’ll take long COVID seriously now that their balls are on the line.”

The worst I have to do is use a different proton version or add in a launch option.

And therein lies the problem that keeps most people from switching to Linux. It’s a super simple thing to do, but Linux users fall into the same fallacy that experts in any field do: just how little the average person knows about the subject. The fact that something doesn’t just work when you try to open it would leave many people stumped. Especially with tech literacy rates declining thanks to kids growing up using mostly cell phones as their daily driver rather than an actual computer and the plug and play nature of Windows and Macs. Asking your average gamer to add command line arguments to a launcher would probably be like telling them they just have to hot wire their car if it doesn’t start when you turn the key.

It’s an emotional thing. They base their beliefs about how the world works based on what makes them feel better about themselves. Everything else is just backtracking from the conclusion to find a justification for it. And anything that doesn’t fit that narrative gets thrown away or ignored.

I disagree that Armstrong didn’t approach that situation in good faith. I think he meant every word he said. Armstrong was a caricature of American Individualism and a diehard fanatic. If you watch his speech now, there’s a lot in there that sounds familiar to modern politics. Including “they’ll make America great again!”

He’s a villain who comes off as a “might makes right” true believer. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical strength, underhanded tactics, cleverness, or sheer endurance. So long as you win, you make the rules.

He believed that the strong should squash the weak, while Raiden believed that the strong should protect the weak, and they both used violence to enforce their beliefs. In his eyes, neither of them were right. Who would decide the rules merely came down to which of them was stronger.

Raiden is Armstrong’s beliefs made manifest. From surviving as a child soldier up to the very moment that he kills Armstrong, he’s enforcing his will on the world around him through his strength. A shift in perspective, which side of the sword you’re on, and Raiden’s justice becomes the same as Armstrong’s oppression.

This is the danger of a true believer of “might makes right.” Because even when you beat them, you didn’t prove them wrong - you merely played by their rules and beat them at their own game. Your might made you right, and nothing more.

His entire audience is “anti-woke” weirdo conservative chuds. I made the mistake of clicking on a video of his on YouTube talking about a trailer or something, and half the comments were people yelling about how the game was gonna suck because of women or something.

You should listen to Senator Armstrong’s speech from Rising and ask yourself if he’d get votes in today’s political landscape.

I think he’d have a noticeable percentage of the voting base of America.