I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is “Just Asking Questions.”

The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you’re asking helps me trust that it’s worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for “so much for the tolerant left” bullshit.

Possibly fair. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I’m not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.

There’s a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.

Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.

And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Actually one of the few political pressures Putin has had to deal with internally has been preventing conscripts from fighting outside of Russian territory, which has included not sending them into the supposedly-annexed oblasts in the east. They’ve had to make do with massive signing bonuses, prison recruitment, stop loss, and PMCs to make up the manpower shortage. Definitely some high-pressure tactics in use, but no actual use of legal force. Unless this video was taken on the Kursk front then any Russian soldiers who this was targeting had signed contracts that they could have chosen not to.

Speaking as the father of a 4-year-old girl, there definitely is. Not that I disagree in principle, but it’s probably a bad example.

Yeah, mate. This is the most credible source I can find and it’s literally about how impossible it is to actually use crypto without tying yourself to the wallet somehow.

The exchange where you traded BTC for USD, which had to comply with AML and KYC laws in order to have access to the US banking system in the first place.

Like, it’s theoretically possible to work with perfect operational security and never ever link your Bitcoin address to the real world, but doing so basically precludes you from doing anything in the real world with it, including buying crypto in the first place.

Sure, I’ll bite.

What part of doing that is mutually exclusive with voting for Harris against project 2025? I’m not going to pretend electoral politics should be the be-all end-all of political participation. Yes, you should organize locally and look for opportunities to support socialist policies and leaders, but given that none of those are on the ballot, you should still use what little power electoral politics give you to try and push the system away from right-wing lunatics who have been very explicit about their plans to make everything socialists complain about significantly worse and to corrupt the democratic systems to try and make it even harder for socialists to take power in the future.

What do you propose we do instead?

It also fits in with the wider pattern of calling the opposition out for their weirdness and pettiness. A subtle “you all remember the tan suit thing, right?” as well as bait for another unforced error.

Would you believe that there’s a racist element to this as well?

So first off, Ukraine couldn’t have joined NATO because of the active territorial dispute re: Crimea, which had been ongoing since 2014. But more importantly, please for the love of God stop following the cold war colonial logic that only Great Powers have any agency in their own international affairs.

Poland, Lithuania, and all the rest of the countries that Putin wants out of NATO are in there because they wanted to be, mostly because they wanted security against Russian invasion. Like, Poland basically blackmailed President Clinton into expanding NATO by threatening to support the Republicans in the next election.

But why would anyone be worried about Russia invading them if they tried to exercise independent agency and leave Moscow 's sphere of influence? Oh wait, look at what’s happening in Ukraine. Maybe those fears weren’t so unfounded. Sweden and Finland certainly seem to think so, since the war led to the most significant expansion of NATO in decades and gave NATO a direct land border within spitting distance of Moscow.

Right next to the illegally-retained classified documents!

I mean, it’s inherently hard to quantify the impact of this kind of thing, but in terms of Putin’s goals for it I think “substantial” is pretty reasonable. It’s not effective in that Russia can’t trigger a color revolution in America any more than America can trigger a color revolution in Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, or any of the Arab Spring nations. But just because they aren’t the source of the divisions in American society that form these fault lines doesnt mean they aren’t actively trying to widen them. Especially when we’re talking about the America First crowd and the Conspiracy Left I think it’s entirely fair to point out loudly and often how the narrative they’re advancing is backed by adversarial powers that actively want to weaken America specifically and democracy in general.

Or to refer back to the original meme, Jimmy Dore may think he’s a lefty, but all his political actions and rhetoric work to the benefit of fascists rather than working people.

If the only options are supporting genocide or being a Russian asset

So about those Ukrainians. Or is genocide, like imperialism, only bad when America does it?

I dunno man. It’s definitely getting repetitive, but when we know that there is a substantial Russian disinfo machine out there and support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is such a consistent theme in these people AND Putin is one of the major beneficiaries of the general turn towards right-wing authoritarianism (because when our politicians say and do the same things it legitimizes those antidemocratic elements of his own regime), it’s not an unfair connection to keep drawing.

The most compelling argument to not call them Russian troll farmers would be for them to simply stop saying all the things a Russian troll farmer would say.

Pretty sure that’s canonically done to “Damn it feels good to be a gangster” and not RATM. Could have been an air conditioner though.

Even Yanukovich had been trying to push for EU membership, AKA the guy who was the target of the so-called coup you’re bitching about. He had to shift gears when Putin’s attitude changed and he could no longer split the two, but the whole “euro” part of Euro Maidan was about the sudden shift away from the EU.

Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.

Ukraine wasn’t able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.

Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it’s weird that you don’t seem to understand that.

Hah! You think they actually put in place the infrastructure needed to support this asinine policy. If there aren’t enough people to get the affidavits signed then those kids can’t go expose themselves to dangerous ideas, presumably including “trans people exist” and “slavery was bad, actually”.

See also voter ID laws that just happen to come into effect as the DMV offices in poor and/or black neighborhoods close down. If they make it a sufficient pain in the ass they don’t have to take the legal or political flak for outright banning it.