Oddly, this sort of thing is the reason that I tend to think that MTG is not as stupid as she appears to be (and the reason I responded to an earlier thread on the subject to ask people what they thought her ratio of malicious to stupid was).

It actually all started with the Jewish space lasers thing, but this one reminded me of it.

She’s clearly stupid (and angry - a common combination among her supporters too). But I just can’t convince myself that she’s so incredibly stupid that she actually believes this. I mean - there’s stupid, but then there’s so frighteningly stupid that she shouldn’t have even been able to survive to adulthood, and this is much more toward the latter.

I guess anything’s possible, but…

Let’s not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won’t do anything meaningful about it, ever.

Well, he is the bestest and most smartest president in the whole history of ever.

For anyone who still has any doubts about who the real groomers and pedophiles are, the far right is now essentially putting up blinking neon signs announcing that it’s them.

On a bit of a side note:

Dimon announced earlier this year he would not make an endorsement prior to the 2024 election.

In August, Dimon wrote in The Washington Post, “We live in a perilous time. Deeply divided, our nation now faces both challenging domestic issues and perhaps the most complicated geopolitical situation since World War II. We may be at an inflection point that will determine the fate of the free and democratic world for decades.”

Though my take on all of that is much more cynical than his, I agree in principle.

We need to elect a president who is dedicated to the ideals that define and unite us, and who is committed to restoring our faith in America and our indispensable role in the world.

And I can see why he won’t endorse anyone - because that person isn’t a candidate.

That was basically my view for a long time (though phrased much more entertainingly than I likely ever could have), but I’ve started to think that at least some portion of it is conscious malice - that she’s not as stupid as she appears.

Boebert, by contrast, clearly is as stupid as she appears. Admittedly, MTG could just have better instincts (they couldn’t hardly be worse), but I think it’s more likely that there’s at least some faint spark of intelligence there, such that she can at least sometimes recognize a particularly useful situation in which to unleash her anger and stupidity.

Or maybe not…

So what do you think MTG’s stupidity to malice ratio is?

In a sense, everything she says and does is malicious, but I think an awful lot of it isn’t technically motivated by malice - it’s just that she’s angry and stupid, so it just ends up also being malicious.

50/50? 60/40? 40/60?

I don’t think it’s any less than about 30% stupid, and I’d be surprised if it’s even that low. Yes - it’s certainly possible for a politician to cultivate an air of stupidity as a disarming cover for their malice, but I just don’t think she has it in her, and particularly not for an extended period. She really has to be, at least to some notable degree, pretty much as angry and stupid as she appears.

Identity in general doesn’t matter much on forums (as opposed to microblogs, like Twitter or Mastodon). Forums are focused on topics rather than people, and what is said is generally more important than who says it.

I keep wondering why we don’t see more of this.

IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.

They’re not going to solve the problem alone, but they’re such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.

Yeah! It’s obviously a deliberate manipulation when Google just links to negative stories about him instead of the positive ones, like… like… um… uh…

It’s safe to assume that the “uncomfortable” part is that he’s either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

It’s not quite true that we “never” hear about Ukraine’s far right. We hear about them fairly regularly in fact - from Putin’s apologists and sycophants.

“We do not currently assess” is ludicrously blatant mealy-mouthed misdirection.

Ah… yes. A lot of things just clicked into place for me, and not just regarding Vance.

Most notably really - trying to grasp the idea of “TheoBros” broadly - I wondered how such a thing is even possible. How can any even moderately intelligent person spend a great deal of time online and cling to a Christian belief at all, and much less a conservative one? There’s just far too much information out there that contradicts that view. Granted, there is of course content tailored to affirm it, but it’s essentially a specialist thing - not just a bubble, but a very specific and limited bubble, surrounded by a sea of contrary views and contradicting facts.

And then it clicked - the way to maintain a conservative Christian viewpoint on the internet is to be an aggressively censorious conspiracy theorist.

The only way they can face the sea of contradictory information is to ascribe it to some sort of ridiculously massive conspiracy by the forces of evil - such that the vast majority of what exists on the internet is the lies of Satan’s minions - and to establish little, aggressively monitored and censored enclaves in which their views and only their views are allowed, and everything else is condemned and preferably censored.

Their whole cognitively dissonant view on “free speech” - in which they somehow simultaneously cry about being “censored” generally simply for being massively downvoted and even as they, in their own bubbles, overtly censor any and all contrary views - suddenly makes sense. They explain away the fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them and even condemn them as a conspiracy to silence them, and create the illusion that they’re not merely a noxious and irrational few by aggressively monitoring and controlling their walled gardens, so that opposition is at least underrepresented if not silenced entirely.

It also explains their slippery relationship with truth, and specifically things like Vance clinging to the Haitians eating pets myth even after it’s been proven false. For them, coming across information that proves them wrong has to be an essentially daily occurrence, so they undoubtedly work out an approach to it, such that they, exactly as he’s doing, just flatly ignore the necessary ramifications of the truth and instead just blithely cling to whatever myth affirms their beliefs.

Yeah… suddenly a whole lot of previously inexplicable behavior and beliefs are making sense to me…

And frankly, while it’s notably pathetic and cringily willfully ignorant, it’s also scary. More on that later maybe…

Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Israel is a rogue state.

I first read that headline as “is deranged.”

Same sentiment but more precise.

Israel is a rogue state.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.