acronym-spouting rules lawyers

That's pretty much the response I got offering even extremely mild dissent from AI spam. Apparently, "WP:MNA" means you can just make shit up as long as industry blog posts rely on that wild fever dream being true, for instance. Handy!

The number of sources isn't really the issue; many of those are industry advertisements, such as blog posts on product pages, for instance. Out of the few that are papers, almost all are written exclusively by industry research teams — while that doesn't on its own invalidate their results, it does mean that there's a strong financial interest in the non-consensus view (in particular, that LLMs can be "programmed"). The few papers that have been peer-reviewed have extreme methodological flaws, such that there's essentially almost no support for the article's bombastic and extreme non-consensus claims.

I could see technology as being black, a la how Korra treated technology vs spirits in its final arc.

Yes and no. Even in living memory, the Southern Strategy goes all the way back to the 60s, and explicitly identifies opposition to the civil rights movement as a conservative goal. Going all the way back to the Civil War, it's undeniable how much the economy of the United States is built on slavery — opposing slavery is thus also an economic argument.

Point being, I don't think there was some time in the past where economic policy could be so cleanly separated from racial justice, gender equality, queer rights, disability advocacy, and other things that are now seen as "polarizing." Every economic debate is, I would posit, at least to some significant degree a proxy for a much more critical human rights debate.

I mean, the trouble is that voting for Democrats does literally support genocide, if only because every president and presidential candidate in modern history has promised and/or enacted genocidal policies. When talking about US politics and genocide, the bar is so low, it's in hell.

The nuance to all of the above is that voting for Republicans supports genocide even more. It's entirely valid to vote for less genocide amongst several genocidal options, and also to call said genocide out.

It's also a question of methods; a giant company simply ignoring an unjust law is typically a pretty poor way to challenge it (as always, there are exceptions). To the extent that Australia is claiming that Musk sees himself as above the law, that's a pretty accurate charge, that holds whether the particular law in question is just or not.

Shorter version: fuck Musk, and also fuck countries claiming they can order takedowns beyond their borders. Both can be true at once.

It's absolutely better than the alternative, but I always feel like that kind of support comes with a caveat or implicit limit. Even in that ad, the narrator still argues for "parent's rights" as an alternative to "big government," rather than emphasizing his parental responsibilities.

I am 100% and unreservedly glad, though, to see that the organization itself is founded by a trans woman (https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/news/main-news/alaina-and-kathy-brennan-kupec-endow-transgender-positive-collection).

It may indeed be, I'm not familiar with Middle East Monitor, but Media Bias/Fact Check are themselves rather infamously biased towards the American right wing. For example, they list the New York Times as nearly as left-biased as their scale goes, despite that the Times has largely taken the Republican party line on a number of issues, such as queer rights (their deceptive coverage of trans rights has been a large part of the current moral panic, and has led to multiple open lettersof protest). The Times was even instrumental in elevating Trump to the presidency with their incredibly dubious decision to give Comey's procedural memo front page placement and a misleading headline mere days before the election

a choice that Nate Silver has said was possibly deciding on the election. The Guardian is also listed as left-center despite even more extreme transphobic editorial decisions than even the Times.

Similarly, they list MSNBC as far-left, despite them having Republican-led shows and frequent Republican guests. I'll definitely agree there's some degree to which they're on the left, but it's pretty minor all told. The idea that they're far left is just ridiculous, and one that only makes sense from the perspective of America's right-wing culture.

At the same time, they list Wall Street Journal as mostly credible, something that just isn't a serious take on media credibility.

(Edited to add: a lot of this comes down to the very strong bias in American media towards the "both sides" idea that if two sources disagree, the truth must be in the middle. That bias is especially clear in discussions of climate change, but it's also prevalent in discussions of other political issues more generally.)

Artists, like all laborers, should be fairly compensated for their work. The idea that love of art should necessarily come into conflict with fair compensation is a primary vehicle for continuing the exploitation of creative labor.

That is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of piracy, though. Some of the most strongly anti-piracy platforms out there are also absolutely terrible in terms of labor rights (hence the current strikes in Hollywood, for instance). It's notable that in this case, the studio seems to be saying fairly explicitly that piracy is indeed not the main obstacle to fair compensation, such that no conflict between their stance and labor rights needs to exist.

Congratulations! Also, if you haven't done so already, getting a nice bra is a true joy.

The fun part is being both parts of this meme — I'm Cassandra, or Xandra for short...

This is so obviously a blatant attempt to take Mr Trump out of the presidential running. And it is a sad day for our nation, considering that others, including Mr Biden, have been caught with classified documents in their possession.

The false equivalency has really taken root. There's zero in common between the two cases, and yet it's such a convenient excuse for right-wingers to fall back on when they're challenged on their support for Trump.