And those exceptions largely prove the rule - the default expectation (not just desire) is that those things not happen. They still do, but it's not something that occurs to most off the tops of their heads. When you educate people on civil forfeiture you get a lot of shocked Pikachu; somewhat fewer with severe water quality issues, but I think that's mostly due to broad publication of Flint's situation in particular raising general awareness.
FWIW… that you can only point to one specific place in the USA with bad water, and some non-specific generalized place is a fairly good point against your argument.
I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another.
And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
This feels very broad strokes. It's like saying Germany is bad because of Nazi Germany. That's not to excuse terrible actions but that these histories are long with a variety of leaders and popular beliefs. So viewing a country as a monolith in line with all its past crimes seems very nationalistic.
Using more current context, leadership and events seems like a more realistic view of things. Which doesn't mean the UK is a shining beacon of freedom or democracy, but just to better explain why things happen instead of blaming events of leaders who are not in office or even alive.
They're not saying the Nazis are truly evil at all, they're just saying that the British people shouldn't have fought the Nazis or were hoodwinked by the govt.
The British were evil, the Chinese were evil, the Japanese were evil, the Belgians were evil, the Spanish were evil, the Incas were evil, the Mongols were evil, the French were evil, the Iroquois were evil, the ancient Egyptians were evil, etc etc etc.
I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.
Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
Yeah this applies to nearly all of Europe IMO. Recent events show that the American Bill of Rights is definitely not a panacea, but at least there's some legal standing to push back against Orwellian measure like those put in place by the UK or the EU.
Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.
While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.
> While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world.
Don’t let defensiveness lead you to say nonsensical things. Nearly every single country in the EU has a worse-than-trumpian party waiting in the wings, or even in power, see Hungary. Ascribing some sort of special property to the EU, a region with absolutely terrible standards for personal liberty, because at the moment there is more respect for liberal democracy there than elsewhere.. well it’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Yes, but many places in the EU use proportional representation or something close to it, so even if those parties gain significant traction, there is still protection as they are forced to work together with the rest of the parties.
In contrast, my own country Canada is far more at risk of the rise of an authoritarian adjacent party. A party with majority control has too much power here, and lack of proportional representation also means that majority control can be achieved with less than 50% of the voting population supporting you.
This is why I say the EU has better protections. The existence of parties that want more authoritarian control shouldn't be a measure of the health of a democratic system. In fact, somehow forcing these parties out would be pretty against the principles of democracy and free speech.
I do suppose its worth asking the question of whether democracy should allow the voting down of democracy itself, but I don't think the EU is at risk of that as a whole, even if a few member states are.
It's an executive order that contravenes existing legislative and judicial precedent, sets penalties, and is expected to be unchallenged. It limits free speech by fiat because a single man wants it to be so.
It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.
Burning American flags is free speech? It's definitely an interpretation... and one that many legal scholars disagree with, similar to Roe v Wade. Not that repealing Roe v Wade was a good thing, but it didn't have a solid legal foundation.
It's not all about getting your way... well maybe the better way to say it is that the left got their way, for sixty years. And some of those wins from that period for the left were built on shaky ground. There has to be give and take in any healthy political system.
Yes. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Texas v Johnson. It is an act that expresses a political view through a symbolic act. It might be offensive to you, but "I find it offensive" is not sufficient defense to stop political speech.
And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)
Yes. Of course it failed. It also succeeded several times. I'm not a communist, though. (I do have communist friends, however.)
Most of my communist friends are not authoritarian communists (aka tankies). A tankie is a very specific type of communist who believes in central autocratic power and a single party.
I think you'll find most modern communists tend to prefer a worker led democratic government. And people like myself prefer a syndicalist democracy without a central government.
I consider tankies my opponents, just like I consider all authoritarians my opponents.
Without some kind of coherent post-Marxist revolutionary understanding of what communism is, this is just pure delusion. Most people don't have the ability to synthesize grand ideas for the direction of society, no offense.
There's like dozens of people in the world that can do these things, and they need to want to use their intellect for such a thing. Unfortunately, communism is just philosophically derelict, until another great thinker comes along.
Good thing I'm not a communist or I might be upset. You keep moving the goal posts all over the place. I was just saying I'm not a tankie, lol, and you've pivoted to philosophers.
But what about Bookchin, Kropotkin, or the people of Rojava? Bakunin? Thoreau?
It's a little more subtle than that. His executive order doesn't ban flag burning as an expression of speech. It only bans flag burning as part of an incitement to violence. I expect the courts will strike it down, but even if they don't it won't be something you get arrested for. It'll be something you get extra time for, like hate speech.
Just for context, what Trump tries to (illegally) ban in US, flag desecration, is already a crime in most of Europe. You can get 3 years for burning the flag in Germany, 2 years in Portugal, 3 years in Switzerland, or 1 year in Poland. Worth keeping in mind when comparing democracy and individual liberty between Europe and US.
But it's obvious when people say "dictatorship" or "fascism" today in the USA it is just a dog whistle for not liking Trump. Nobody called Obama a fascist for how Chelsea Manning was treated.
It's absolutely not the case. The US is an empire with increasingly dictatorial power centralized in the executive. Clinton increased prison populations and increased police power. Bush increased executive power during his post 9-11 presidency. Obama regularly enforced U.S. policy at the end of a drone strike and shut down U.S. domestic agitation. Biden increased police funding and continued to sell surplus military equipment to cops. He also shut down a workers strike. Trump is a symptom of a general slide towards dictatorial policy. If it wasn't him this time it would have been one of the next 5 presidents from either policy.
Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.
Okay here's a secret that you probably won't hear other than in some books that are hard to find.
The youth desire a strong executive. They don't yet understand why it can be a bad thing, because they have little experience with people having power over them that aren't their parents or teachers.
The middle aged desire a strong legislative branch, the most fair branch of government. They have enough life experience to understand why. They are not quite old enough to be set in their ways just yet.
The elderly desire a strong judicial branch. Judges are almost always old, and biased towards the opinions of the elderly, left or right.
There is nothing wrong with a strong executive. It is just completely at odds with those who still control the vast majority of the money and power, and of course, mainstream media: the Boomers. JFK, Great Society, these are marked by a desire for a strong executive. Ironic, of course.
A strong executive can stop them, and the Boomers have never been told 'no' in their entire lives. Really truly, everybody was young in the 1960's. They warped society to their will, just like the people in every baby boom in history. You misinterpret their tantrum as something substantive.
I'm old (50s), I don't want a strong any of those. I especially, however, don't want a strong executive because I don't think decision making should be strongly centralized.
I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.
It's really fundamentally unimportant what you specifically believe. What is important is what people your age in the aggregate believe. This is an undeniable truth. It's therefore silly to engage in a conversation about you and your beliefs specifically. I recommend trying to understand Plato's ideas first.
Well, I disagree. What evidence do you have to demonstrate that a) this is true and b) it's so unassailable that one could not deny it?
Because it sure reads like, "I have a worldview. I will assert that it is true and talk down to anyone who does not accept my worldview as truth." It's a way to paint your discussion partner as an intellectual lesser, while adroitly dodging critique. You'll have to do better than just asserting something is true because you said so.
1. Degrees / magnitude. How many cases of dictatorial behavior were there with Obama vs Trump? Every president signs executive orders, but trump signs a lot more of them.
2. Defiance to checks in power. The current administration seems uniquely defiant of both the legislative and the judicial branches, both in rhetoric and act.
You have to stop thinking it's us or them. You have to stop imagining that somehow any of this is ok because my team or your team did or didn't do something.
I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.
Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.
I'm not a tankie, and if you think all leftists are tankies you definitely need to refresh some definitions.
Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.
> And in turn federal district judges have signed a lot more nationwide injunctions? Orders of magnitude more than had ever been issued?
that by itself doesn't mean much. More EOs and especially illegal ones produces more injunctions.
> No, but it's different when my opponent does it.
No it's not different but the amount that's done matters. I for one have no issues calling out overreach by "my" side as well (which is more than can be said about most MAGAs). But I'm also going to call it out when the "other" side is doing it as normal course of governing vs being the exception.
How many legislations has this administration proposed let alone passed? vs how many EOs signed just since Jan?
The Obama administration wielded the power of the executive branch against its political opponents. And then the media ran cover for them -- "the Obama administration had no scandals!"
Using the IRS to target your political opponents should have been disqualifying. Running guns to the cartels should have been impeachable.
Texas gerrymandering with an overt publicly stated goal to bias the election is enough evidence. But if you want more: sending the military to intimidate politicians (Newsom), deporting and arresting people with permanent residency or other forms of legal immigration, arresting citizens without cause, intimidating law firms, journalists, and news companies by using the power of the executive branch to punish individuals and organizations, illegally dismantling congressionally established governmental organizations and branches.
This is just a small summary. Foreigners are not visiting the US, not because they don't want to or don't like the US, but because they are afraid of visiting a non-free country. It's not worth the risk of getting detained because you posted a negative comment online about a government official.
Notably, Eisenhower did not militarize the national guard to go after groups of people who are not politically aligned. He militarized them to protect groups of people. Quite the opposite and a poor choice of an equivocal example.
yea right.
Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights), while the U.S. legal system offers almost no general privacy protection. On top of that, the NSA has a long history of warrantless surveillance and backdoors (Snowden, PRISM), with very limited oversight. In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
> Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights)
A fundamental right that is being challenged every 6 month or so for the last 3 years with the push for Chat Control.
> In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
Absolutely false. With the way the EU commissions work, all you need is to buy or lobby your way in single one place and then you can push for any agenda that you want.
Privacy does not exist in reality but in a very limited form. For example you can be stopped and identified on the street by a policemen in most EU countries with no reason, where is your privacy then?
Also EU has a lot of rights on paper that don't exist in reality. Free speech? Come in my country, you can go to jail for speech, there are several ways, way too many. Rights to property? Good joke. What rights do we really have in EU? I don't know any.
It's not uncomfortable everyone knows it. The problem is with self righteous political activists masquerading as judges and civil servants who are so convinced of the justice of their cause that they feel no need to justify themselves to anyone and trample on dissent . And a class of elitist politicians with contempt for the people who voted them in.
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.
I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
> in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
This varies a lot by country. The French are still known for their protests, certainly not nearly as violent or disruptive in the modern day as their famous 18th-century revolution but very much quite impactful even so. And German trade unions use strikes very effectively to have a fair outcome in contract negotiations with employers.
Countries in the English-speaking world, certainly including the UK but also the US and Canada, seem a lot more deferential to elites in many ways than most of continental Europe.
The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.
I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.
That comparison doesn't make sense. FISC can only be a rubber stamp because only the US government can bring a case before the court. Any rando can sue German ISPs for not fulfilling their DNS blocking duties under copyright law, but certainly not just any rando can get their DNS blocking request rubberstamped.
The policy change also doesn't create a new court. The CUII is a voluntary cooperation whose members exchange information about sites they think they're required to block and agree to all block them simultaneously. Because this structurally looks like an illegal cartel, there used to be a review step by the Federal Network Agency Bundesnetzagentur to make sure that no illegal cartel things were going on.
The Bundesnetzagentur felt that this wasn't really part of their core duties, especially considering that there was a perfectly fine court system ready to use, so they asked the CUII to find another way of not looking like an illegal cartel.
Now the CUII will wait for one of their ISP members to get sued, in regular civil court, and if the ISP is ordered to perform a block, the CUII will put it on their list and the other ISPs will follow suit without having to redo the legal proceedings for each of them.
This change might very well end up increasing the number sites that get blocked, not due to rubberstamping, but because losing a civil suit is less risky than accidentally doing illegal cartel stuff and incurring a correspondingly large fine.
I thought ROM hacks were just modified ROMs, not programs that modify ROMs. In any case, that still wouldn't make much sense. Surely an automatic patcher is a pretty trivial piece of software, system-wise. It just reads a binary file and writes out a different binary file after doing some in-memory manipulations. Why would a an AV flag such a program? I don't buy this explanation.
EDIT: Furthermore, what's the proposed workflow? Does the Internet Archive run AVs over its collections? There's no way, right? That would be a massive compute expense.
> I thought ROM hacks were just modified ROMs, not programs that modify ROMs.
Distributing a modified ROM is as much copyright infringement as distributing the base ROM itself, so generally hacks are distributed as just the patch file and you have to provide your own copy of the base ROM and patch it from there.
It sounds like this site is packing the two together, and the patchers are causing the flagging issues. That also to me seems like the simple solution is to not do that and just distribute the patches without the software and have a note in the description pointing to a separate source for the patcher.
> Surely an automatic patcher is a pretty trivial piece of software, system-wise. It just reads a binary file and writes out a different binary file after doing some in-memory manipulations. Why would a an AV flag such a program? I don't buy this explanation.
A virus that wants to infect other executables on the system is going to have patching code in it where it's relatively rare in "legitimate" software so it makes sense for antimalware heuristics to find it suspicious.
I think you're just guessing here without an accurate mental model of what is being described.
> It sounds like this site is packing the two together,
1. No; as you said, no ROM hacking site distributes the original ROM. This one is no exception. They don't want to flagrantly violate copyright. (And in fact, modern patch formats — xDelta, UPS, BPS — are designed to avoid even minor "quotations" of the original copyrighted material, by using "copy offset:length" ops, or by storing partial/sparse patch segments as XOR deltas of the old and new files.)
> and the patchers are causing the flagging issues
2. No ROM hacking site distributes a patcher executable along with the patch. It'd be a huge waste of both bandwidth and storage space on their CDN. Besides the very reason coming up here (novel archives containing executables make anti-virus programs unhappy), there's also the fact that modern emulators, when loading a ROM, will auto-apply a patch in-memory if one is found in the same directory + with the same basename as the ROM. (Similar to how VLC auto-loads subtitle files if found beside a video file.) Creating an on-disk modified ROM using an explicit patcher utility is, for the most part, unnecessary today.
FYI, I downloaded the first ROMhack I saw from the referenced site (romhack.ing). It was a .zip file. Decompressing it, all it contained was a set of .ips files (variants of the patch) and a README.txt.
In short, there is no inherent, structural reason that a site hosting only archive files like this one, would trigger any anti-virus system.
>A virus that wants to infect other executables on the system is going to have patching code in it where it's relatively rare in "legitimate" software so it makes sense for antimalware heuristics to find it suspicious.
Sure, but what an AV is going to look for is code that manipulates executable files, not random binary files. If the patchers are designed to apply patch files to ROMs rather than having the patches embedded then it makes even less sense that they get flagged.
You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.
This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.
If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.
The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.
MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.
... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.
Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match.
Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb!
The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.
Take PSA, since it's a simpler example. You're right that, if we screen everyone, taking action based on the outcome causes more harm than good. The response is to calibrate... which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
With the MRI, you don't get back simple dichotomous things, but you get back potential indications. That can be scary - talk about calibration all you want, but if patients see things and start thinking about the big C word there are likely to be a lot of unnecessary biopsies.
The bottom line is that it's possible to imagine a benefit, but it is not reasonable to pretend it's as simple as "just re-calibrate your interpretation of the results!". There's a reason that a lot of thought goes into when to do screening.
> which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
This just isn't true. In practice any such screening model can ALWAYS improve with more data—basically because the statistical power goes up and up—up to an asymptote set by noise in the physical process itself.
> That can be scary
Handling that is the job of professionals, is now and will continue to be.
It is extremely reasonable to imagine a benefit! What is doubtful is imagining there wouldn't be one!
I find the line of reasoning in this whole anti-MRI-everyone argument to be bewildering. I think it is basically an emotional argument, which has set in as "established truth" by repetition; people will trot it out by instinct whenever they encounter any situation that suggests it. It reflects lessons collectively learned from the history of medicine, its over-estimation of its own abilities and its overfitting to data, and its ever-increasing sensitivity to liability.
But it is not inherently true—it is really a statement about poor statistical and policy practices in the field, which could be rectified with concerted effort, with a potential for great public upside.
Not that any of this matters at the current price point. But, on a brief investigation, the amortized cost of a single MRI scan is ~$500-800—perhaps 1/5 what I would have guessed!
> This just isn't true. In practice any such screening model can ALWAYS improve with more data—basically because the statistical power goes up and up—up to an asymptote set by noise in the physical process itself.
That isn't how this works at all.
1. If you assume the test results are iid, sure you can increase your precision (presuming you're talking about repeatedly testing people?), but biology is messy and the tests are correlated. You can get all kinds of individual-specific cross-reactivity on a lab assay, for example. As another example, you can't just keep getting more MRIs to arbitrarily improve your confidence that something is cancer/not cancer/a particular type of cancer etc.
2. Statistical power is not relevant here, but rather different kinds of prediction error. It turns out that in the general population, it is NOT medically relevant that PSA is correlated with the presence of prostate cancer, because it is NOT predictive of mortality, and it IS a cause for unnecessary intervention and thus harm to patients.
I really don't mean to cause offense, but you're talking about this like someone who has no idea how these concepts interact with reality in the biomedical world. Like, you seem to be applying your intuition about how tabular data analysis tends to work in systems you're familiar with, and assuming it generalizes to a context where you don't have experience.
> this whole anti-MRI-everyone argument to be bewildering
It's not about being against MRIs, it's about the idea that (even ignoring costs/cost effectiveness) there are known real-world effects of over-screening people for things.
> But it is not inherently true—it is really a statement about poor statistical and policy practices in the field, which could be rectified with concerted effort, with a potential for great public upside.
This is still not at all a certainty. Let's say you lock this behind a screening system run by data scientists so that there's no patient or provider pressure to act in what you're calling a statistically poor manner. Ok, then what? They have to come up with a decision rule about when to dig deeper and get more data (which again, isn't an MRI, but rather is often an invasive procedure). It is not obvious that there exist any decision rule that could reasonably be arrived at that would be a good trade-off in terms of false positives and the corresponding additional burden.
I am 1000% willing to entertain the idea that new screening can be a net benefit, but we'd need to know what kind of sensitivity/specificity tradeoff would be involved to even start approximating the numbers, and then you'd need to do a trial to demonstrate that it's worthwhile, and even then you'd need to do post-trial monitoring to make sure there aren't unexpected second order effects. People DO, in fact, do this work.
The idea that "more data == better" is just way too simplistic when the data is messy and necessarily inconclusive, the outcomes of interest are rare, and the cost of additional screening can be severe - again also ignoring that all of this is expensive in the first place.
I've heard many horror stories of bank/brokerage accounts being frozen despite all deposits being legitimate, not to mention not being able to transfer large amounts or not even being allowed to open an account.
Meanwhile crooks somehow manage to have bank accounts in all the big banks without issues.
Is there? They are already a few rungs up from illegal criminals. Not much further to get to anyone since these are approved visa holders. Im just waiting for them to declare all Californians as non-citizens at this point.
>That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union.
I know this is just frustrated anger, but it does no good. Our union has survived more than one braindead administration before. We fought a war killing hundreds of thousands to save it for god's sake. We dealt with Zachary Tyler and Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland. We'll get past this moron and be stronger for it, just watch.
People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.
I hadn't even considered that some right wing folks would be bothered by that statistic, as if deportations were good, actually. But no, I'm sure it does bother some folks in the right.
Until we can decouple those things, banning porn has the effect of criminalizing LGBTQ lives.