The only winners in this scenario are governments that want more control over their citizens’ digital lives.

And that, as the saying goes, is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn’t make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn’t even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won’t stick.

In his mom’s basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

Gotta love the irony of a song that condemns having to “pick a tribe and hate the other side” that still can’t manage to refrain from doing exactly that.

I don’t have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: “hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability.”

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it’s not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it’s likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

They’re going to have to get in line.

It means that either the test is flawed, the results are bogus or the report is a lie.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability.

Current AIs have been designed to produce content that (optimally) mimics the products of reason, but they do not in fact reason at all, so they cannot possess measurable intelligence.

Much more to the point, current AIs have been designed to make enormous piles of money for corporations and venture capitalists, and I would pretty much guarantee that that has more to do with this story than anything else.

I really shouldn’t like it, since games in which you die repeatedly generally just irritate me, but something about it keeps me coming back. And dying.

Skyrim is the most obvious one - it just seems more appropriate in the winter.

Ditto The Long Dark, though it’s notably not festive.

When it’s really cold, and especially at night, I sometimes get an urge to play Little Inferno - it’s sort of like one of those old fireplace videos, except with added surrealism and silliness.

Again though it wasn’t just a threat - it was a very specific if/then statement - “I’ve arranged it so that if he has me killed, he will be killed.”

Granted that it’s a bit unsettling, my immediate response, and IMO the likely immediate response of virtually anyone and everyone, would be “But I don’t intend to have you killed.”

Huh.

She didn’t simply threaten to have him killed - she said that she had arranged to have him killed if he had her killed.

So it’s only really a “threat” if he intends to have her killed.

So essentially, Bongbong is admitting that he intends to have her killed.

Why would you think ideology is even relevant?

Much though the world would be instantly improved if that vile, racist piece of shit Pauline Hanson was dead, she’s under no real threat of being murdered by her political opponents - that’s just not the way that Australians do things.

And she knows that.

Isn’t accusing Marcos of corruption sort of like accusing the Pope of being Catholic?

I mean - he’s a Marcos. Corruption is all he knows.

And really, specifically what she did was threatened to have those people killed if they had her killed.

That seems to me to be a reasonable precaution, all things considered.

I’ve never been sure if it was a situational thing or a general thing, but years ago my then-girlfriend and I cleaned a suite of offices three nights a week, and I was surprised to discover that the women’s restroom was generally much worse than the men’s. And I don’t mean just messy - I mean foul and gross.

I never did figure out why that was, but the difference was undeniable.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.

The most maddening, astonishing and discouraging part of the whole thing, for me, is that that isn’t even really debatable. From any reasonable, purely fact-based and unbiased viewpoint, Israel has been clearly maneuvering for decades now to conquer everything from the river to the sea, and to oppress, displace or kill as many Palestinians as it takes to do it.

The Gaza genocide isn’t an aberration - it’s the direct culmination of decades of very deliberate Israeli policy and strategy. It’s not a coincidence that they had exactly one Prime Minister who advocated for Palestinian statehood and they assassinated him - it’s because Palestinian statehood has never really been an option.

The plain fact is simply that the only reason there’s even any difference of opinion about the matter is that some number of assholes - power-hungry assholes and greedy assholes and hateful assholes and ignorant assholes - have a vested interest in lying about it or at the least promoting the lies that their fellow assholes tell.

I think the clearest indicator of the philosophical and moral bankruptcy of the entire matter is the fact that anyone believes for even a second that Israel has a meaningful opinion on whether or not a Palestinian state can or should exist.

In any sane and rarional world, Israel would not be seen to have the right to make that decision, or even to hold a meaningful opinion on the matter. It should be ENTIRELY a matter to be decided by the Palestinian people.

But this is not a sane or rational world.

So as is generally the case with this sort of story, I find myself wondering if he’s such a monster that they can’t sweep it under the rug or if he just happened to piss off the wrong people.

Sexual assault in the military - like church pedophilia, police brutality and political corruption - is one of those crimes that is deplorably common and almost always ignored. So when they do prosecute someone for it, there has to be something else to it. It can’t just be that he’s thought to be guilty of the crime, since hundreds or even thousands of others are at least as likely guilty of the same crime, and are not even under threat and quite likely never will be. So what’s special about him?

It’s not really relevant to anything, and it’s certainly not as if he should be spared just because so many others are allowed to get away with it (exactly the opposite in fact - each and every single one of them, without exception, should face the full force of the law, and the fact that so many don’t is a prime example of why and how this country is going to shit).

Still though, I find myself wondering, as I often do.

Because people are miserable and desperate and they want to blame someone or something, and bigotry is simple and superficially satisfying.

And because some number of those who actually are to blame for their misery and desperation have self-servingly encouraged them.