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.

Oh look - bullshit from the NYT.

There are no meaningful “hopes” for a cease-fire, because everyone who’s actually involved or even just honestly paying attention knows full well that Israel is never going to agree to one - that their one and only goal from the beginning was and is the annexation of the entirety of Gaza, and they’re not going to stop murdering Gazans until they achieve that goal (if they ever atop at all).

This is just shallow propaganda to try to distract from the fact of Israel’s malevolence and the complicity of its western allies, and most notably of the US.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ll never stop being cynically amused by the fact that the self-styled American patriots are letting the Russian government tell them how to vote.

True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.

People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff

Ironically enough, that’s because they’re stupid.

It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.

Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.

But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.

I guarantee that the explanation for this would become very obvious if one were to simply, as the cliche has it, “follow the money.”

So the unspoken bit about RFK Jr. is that he’s a tweaker, right?

I mean, the details are all in the context of politically entitled progeny, but the underlying vibe I get from the stories about him is very reminiscent of the tweakers I’ve known over the years.