The US landing on the moon, Russia and the US on the cusp of war, folks sick with measles; the 1960s are a wild time to be alive.

“Children who do survive this war will not only bear the visible wounds of traumatic injuries, but the invisible ones too: Those of repeated displacements, constant fear and witnessing family members literally dismembered before their eyes. These psychological injuries have led children as young as five to tell us that they would prefer to die."

MSF’s Secretary General Christopher Lockyear

@palestine
#Gaza
#children
#trauma
#MSF

There’s an ugly question hovering over that previous post: What if the men •are• intrinsically better? What if discrimination is correct?? What if the AI, with its Perfect Machine Logic, is bypassing all the DEI woke whatever to find The Actual Truth??!?

Um, yeah…no.

A delightful tidbit from the article: a researcher studying a hiring AI “received a high rating in the interview, despite speaking nonsense German when she was supposed to be speaking English.”

These systems are garbage.

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Guess what? Their software succeeded!…at identifying photos taken by Macalester’s admissions dept.

It turns out that all the publicity photos, massaged and prepped for recruiting material, had more vivid colors than the photos they took. And they’d mostly used publicity photos for the “happy” rooms and their own photos for the “sad” rooms (which generally aren’t in publicity materials).

They’d encoded a bias in their dataset, and machine learning dutifully picked up the pattern.

Oops.

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Do I support all Biden policies? No. Do I think Trump would have policies 100 times worse that could have lasting effects? Definitely. Is it hard to buy groceries and pay bills now? Yes. 2019? Same. Do I remember protesters being abducted/gassed? Proud Boys/Boogaloo? Yes. Do I want them back? No!

I don't think it would be a good idea to let Trump win.

@NoraReed I'd say The Sunset Tree. Point him to "This Year" to start. It's an easy in. Then there's "Love love love" and "hast thou considered the tetrapods" that have great imagery.

Whatever album you point him to, make sure he's got the lyrics up while listening. Cause The Mountain Goats are super lyric intensive, I've found that the people that don't like them at first either aren't lyric people, or just don't understand what he's saying.

King's Quest V: the groundbreaking installment by Sierra which introduced 256 color VGA graphics to their adventure games.
#sierraonline #adventuregames #retrogaming

RIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills

Go deep enough, the floor is always lava.

@Mikal border security should be an issue we address! But it needs to be coupled with a reassessment of our asylum rules and numbers, an increase in the number of judges that handle those cases, and a realistic view of what migrant workers bring to the table in our country.

I'm all for "an impenetrable wall" which obviously this wasn't, if we can get everything else above.

Every time I hear someone go on about "border security" I'm going to post this video of me pushing open a "gate" cut by cartels in the border fence; a fence that cost billions of dollars and is easily defeated by cheap cordless cutting tools.

There are two ways to have a secure border: place groups of soldiers in fortified bunkers every 100' along the *entire length of the fence* 24/7 (no, don't do this), or by helping to stabilize the economic and security situations in the countries people are arriving from while also having a humane and easy to navigate immigration policy.

Many of the people coming here in hopes of asylum are arriving from countries with a history of U.S. support for dictators (e.g. Honduras, Nicaragua) or as direct or indirect climate refugees. Given that the U.S. is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter (and, I believe, the largest per capita), we legitimately owe these people safe harbor.

#border #immigration #BorderWall #BorderSecurity #SeekingAsylumIsNotACrime

@NoraReed #lifegoals

i once killed so many cops in baldurs gate 2 that minsc got mad and left

Here's the thing about this opinion: Defendants usually lose motions to dismiss because hurdles are so high, but this decision was particularly biting.

I think it's safe to say at this point that Trump knows (or is reasonably sure) he will be convicted of these charges in D.C.

The tone of this decision is completely professional but the message is clear: Nope. Sorry. You get no special consideration as a former president, thereby torpedoing what he thinks is his strongest defense.

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#FunReadingLegalDocuments

Here is Judge Chutkan's order denying Trump's motion to dismiss based on claims of immunity: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.171.0.pdf

A motion to dismiss is a pretrial motion that says "even if everything the prosecution says is true, there is no case and nothing to put before the jury because I win as a matter of law."

These are always uphill battles.

Here, Trump put forward a novel theory about presidential immunity.

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@mmasnick has done the world a solid for devoting considerable time and effort transcribing Elmo's rambling comments that were indecipherable except for the repeated exhortations that people exercising their rights to free speech and association fuck themselves.

My favorite section:

ARS: I understand that, but there’s a reality too, right? I mean Linda Yaccarino’s right here and she’s gotta sell advertising.

Elon: Yes, no, no, right. Yes. No. Absolutely so. No, no, totally. So, no, no, so. Actually what this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company.

ARS: [realizing that Elon seems to be encouraging a boycott that will, as he just said, kill the company] And you think that the…

Elon: But, the whole world will know that the advertisers killed the company. And we will document it in great detail.

ARS: But those advertisers are going to say “we didn’t kill the company…”

Elon: Oh yeah? Tell that to Earth!

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/30/elon-after-personally-driving-away-advertisers-tells-them-to-go-fuck-themselves-repeatedly-and-says-earth-will-judge-them-for-killing-extwitter/

@Hey_Beth I think that's all fair. There are a lot of accounts/people on there that are "doing it for the clicks." I'm still there. I find it a better source of breaking news than any of the others. And I recognize that I've never used Twitter as it was intended. I've been on there for 12 years and have 39 followers, and I'm following 149 ppl (a bunch of which don't post there anymore). But the API is still better then any I've seen elsewhere. Willing to be wrong, just need the right alternative

I think the thing I like least about Mastodon is that.. I like my petty college football coverage. I like my slightly less pedantic NFL coverage. I like some political coverage... and I like some social issues coverage. And for whatever reason, Mastodon isn't checking all of those boxes for me. If you have some ppl I should follow to fix that, please lmk!

Do you know where the term “liberal arts” comes from? I long assumed it meant “liberal” as in “all-inclusive” or something…but no. The original Latin phrase, _artes liberalis_, means roughly “skills or practiced principles worthy of a free person.” Free as in taking a fully privileged part in civic life. Free as in self-determining. Free as in not a servant or a slave.
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This thread is now available as a blog post:
https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto

–––

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

1. I was (and am) named Paul.
2. The prof, Cal Roetzel, was (and is) cool.

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD

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