Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.

2 reasons jump to mind.

1. When I listen to people who personally identify with the people of Gaza, it goes way beyond logic. They have a completely emotional reaction. Their choices are almost completely driven by the question of, “Who is doing what, right now?” Questions of, “Who will do what 6 months from now?” take a distant back seat.

2. Every time the topic comes up, Democrats dogpile on them and call them morons. People will often respond with something like, “Yeah but that’s OK because they ARE morons.” I won’t argue if that’s true or not but it’s pretty obvious that line of reasoning won’t win a lot of converts.

I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.

Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.

In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.

We don’t send arms to Sudan. We don’t send arms to Putin. We don’t send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don’t send arms to Boko Haram. We don’t send arms to Myanmar.

Not a bad start. I hope there are some entertaining responses and I hope he dials the bombast up to 11 next time.

So two kinda niche communities are going to fight over who gets to own “Locktober”?

I kind of hope someone animates this. I would watch, “Kinksters vs Gymrats: the Conquest of Locktober”.

I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.

It’s a bit more than “nobody”.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1154391

The problem is that the minority that is uncomfortable doing or saying anything is backed by half the worlds carrier fleets and thousands of nuclear armed ICBMS.

Maybe.

There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Haha. Maybe.

I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.

There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.

This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.

It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.

Source I am from Austria. :)

That’s inherent to the idea of theft. We judge thieves based on their thefts.
It’s irrelevant if they also happen to have a bunch of stuff they didn’t steal.

A few stolen artifacts corrupt the legitimacy of the entire exhibit.

Allies are only ever allies of convenience.

The US was allied with both the USSR and China for the sake of convenience. Right after that war the US allied with its erstwhile enemies, Japan, Germany and Italy for the sake of convenience. The Marshal Islands maintain diplomatic relations with both China and the US for their own convenience.

BRIC (South Africa joined later) was initially coined as a description of quickly emerging economies by a Goldman Sachs economist. Since then it’s become an actual trading block that coordinates on economic policy. It’s very obviously dominated by China but the other members see advantage in joining a club that’s not obviously dominated by the US.

The combined GDP of BRICS nations now exceeds the combined GDP of the G20. If it’s a joke, it’s a pretty successful one.

If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
SSS - unique
SAS - unique
ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
ASA - unique
SAA - unique
AAA - infinite solutions

Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.

I keep wondering if information like this will change anyone’s mind about Disney.

It seems like all Iger has to do is throw a little shade at Trump or DeSantis and everyone instantly believes that Disney is some sort of bastion of progressive thought that doesn’t have a vile history of exploitation.

The Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber don’t count? :)

They fail gloriously at at that too.

Whenever they get tested the red teams manage to smuggle in everything needed to hijiack a plane plus a kitchen sink.

The few times that terrorists tried to board planes, they made it through security and were caught by other passengers.