Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO
The ban of every website’s existence.
I’ll have to take your word for it
They’ll be blind inside a month trying to work like that.
No sane person is going to spend that massive amount of money
I do remember a friend who dropped $1200 on linked GeForce 1040s(?) to max out the settings in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
Was it worth it? Probably not. Will people with more money than sense do it? Absolutely.
And, to be fair, it is.
It’s not. The Resident Evil side-by-side is the clearest example.
You took what was supposed to be a grim, shadowy, grungy, dusty set piece and you made it brighter, cleaner, smoother, and happier. That subverts the whole mood of the game. Now imagine DLSS 5 doing this same kind of work on a shambling zombie or a Licker or William Birkin from RE2. You really want your super mutants and murder hobos to get this kind of glow-up?
This reminds me of an old mod that got rid of all the fog in Silent Hill. People posted it to joke about how it destroyed the entire vibe, making large parts of the setting trivially easy to solve.
Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.
That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.
Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.
We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.
Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.
It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.
As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.
Let us not forget our fine Latino men and women. Men 50% women 43%.
Lots of expats from Venezuela and Cuba who see Republicans as patrons for their clans. And Republicans reward these blocks with special privileges - prioritization for immigration, exception from state violence, lucrative positions in both the legal and illegal economy.
Marco Rubio got his start selling concaine on behalf of his brother in law Orlando Cicilia, for instance. He was able to rapidly rise through the political scene by playing in an industry the CIA had long staked out for Cuban exiles.
Plenty of Republican women voters are post-menopausel already. Plenty are insistent that their daughters get pregnant already, or that their son’s sexual partners carry a fetus to term.
This isn’t a gender thing nearly so much as a class thing.
But why does Haley Joel Osment have AIDS?
Do it armed with overpowered flashlights and broom handles. Those dogs are dogshit.
Stop making vertical territories. Just stop it. If it’s a long skinny shape on a map, it shouldn’t exist.
And Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
Which one of these is Israel?
To a prior PM, it would be in extremely bad taste. But this bitch is nakedly fascist.
each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained
You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.
your type are to tightly wound up
My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?
There’s a reason we say we have a “Special Relationship” with the UK and not Spain.
So, one big juxtaposition is between Spain and the UK.
Both have access to natural gas reserves in the Atlantic. Both have enormous wind resources, due to their large coastlines. One of them has a government focused on keeping the retail price of energy low. Another has a government focused on keeping the profit generated by energy providers high.
The UK is seeing a surge in energy prices that has nothing to do with their actual supply of energy. They’re just pegging the retail price to the global spot price, because of decades of deregulation and rent-seeking. And because entrenched private interests hate competition, the roll-out of new energy supplies has been curtailed by a government incentivized to do nothing and allow the private sector to price gouge.
Spain’s real triumph is not simply its investment in domestic energy infrastructure but it’s socialist public policy with regard to energy pricing and distribution. The political rewards in keeping prices low has a knock-on effect of incentivizing the development of rapid new build-out in low-cost infrastructure.
Historically, the bar has been set extraordinarily low. But that’s largely based on the question of informed consent. Articles like this aren’t going to show up on FOX or ABC or CBS, so long as the people perpetrating the crimes are Israeli. By contrast, if an Iranian or Russian or Chinese or <insert scary country here> police force engaged in such an act, it would be held up as an excuse for carpet bombing their power plants and assassinating their university professors.
We aren’t in a position to allow or disallow without a large scale mobilization of labor. Even then, a lot of what you’re talking about begins with boring bureaucratic shit like petitions and marches. The violence doesn’t just go away because some pollster can show a broad public disgust (for - again - events the major Western media isn’t interested in covering).
Without assess to mass media, the public remains broadly uninformed and disinterested. Without a mobilized labor movement, there is no organizational support for individual dissent.
Even when such things do exist (Italian and Spanish citizens have been at the forefront of the BDS movement), there are countervailing forces among the plutocracy that obstruct material change.
The belief that you can unilaterally or rapidly affect sweeping international policy changes - that you are some Great Man of History who has volunteered to be apathetic - is going to drive you insane, if you let it.