Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.

Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.

And the EU just expanded their legal use

Maybe you’re safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.

Ie. Prove the rules of divination as written in their belief system.

Traditionally, you prove (or more practically refute) the efficacy of a magical system like divination through empirical consistency.

Divination doesn’t work because it is unreliable. I can predict, say, the next week of weather or the outcome of an athletic game through climatology or sabermetrics far more reliably than the I Ching or Tarot.

But let’s pretend it did work. I’m not sure how you’d functionally prove it.

The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don’t want.

Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence

In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life.

Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.

Very hard to get rid of all the rotten drywall if you’re not willing to swing the hammer

Start at the bottom and work your way up.

Or just become a Senator at the age of 30 by selling out to your state’s massive insurance and legal community.

Chase wants to completely get rid of all tariffs, so, I mean, some of his policies aren’t the greatest

He makes a compelling argument against tariffs as public policy. But he’s still a business-first libertarian, which means his views on environmental regulation and labor rights and various federal public services also suck.

Guns? Great. Drugs? Great. Crime and punishment? Great.

Eh. I wish his immigration policy was as laisse-faire as his guns and drugs policy.

But most of his power and economics policies would completely dog-fuck the US economy

Our economy was dog-fucked ages ago, when we deindustrialized the midwest and plowed endless subsidies into FIRE and Tech sectors. Now we’ve got a bunch of computers churning out trillion dollar digital nothings, while investment cash flows like a waterfall into finance, insurance, and real estate, but our actual industrial capacity remains in a vestigial state.

We can’t even make enough new silicon chips to feed our antiquated ICE engine automotive industry.

I don’t think Oliver really has a path out of that mess, but its hardly his fault we got here.

Its weird, but the game felt like it was going to be adding maps and combat zones with relative frequency. But I agree, the game got stale fairly quickly. It was fun, but not meaningfully more fun than Counterstrike or DOTA

It sucks, and is something we absolutely need to fix in the future…

But we’re literally picking the new head of the HR department. And every head of HR before this person was picked this way, because of the policies set by that HR department. Like, the only way you could change this rule would be for 37 of our 50 departments to come together and agree to change the rules as part of a company wide convention. And all of them run their HR systems the same way, so that doesn’t look too likely.

I just want to point out there’s a third guy running and he’s only got a mild case of brain worms.

Joe Biden is either the singularly greatest president to have ever lived and our only hope for the future or the worst president in history, a total disaster, possibly the entire reason everything bad has ever happened.

I haven’t decided who I’m voting for yet, so I can’t tell which.

I’m convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans.

Given the budgets they have to work with, I imagine Americans have it much worse off. An hour on Facebook deluges you with more advertisement than any given NKer probably sees in a weak.

I can envision this being like Shark Tank, but with the added benefit of educating uninformed minds as to why these people are idiots.

The gimmick only really works from season to season if you occasionally allow one of these freaks to win.

Also sets up this ridiculous standard of “debate”, wherein arguing over a thing is considered more important than actually understanding a thing. Episode after episode of people making increasingly fanciful claims and fraudulent proofs will simply reinforce the idea that the Earth is, in fact, flat. If you have a parade of people asserting with supreme confidence that this theory is true, you create the impression that there is some serious doubt about the shape of the planet.

We should though. He seems like a cool dude with a good head on his shoulders and we’d all be better off if we took his advice.

If you can explain how magic works, it isn’t “real magic”. Sort of the paradox of magic as a concept.

If I can dangle a steel penny in the air with a couple of magnets, is that a miracle? Only if I don’t know how magnets works.

Nonsense. The only problem my country has is the problem created by the evil foreigners who threaten my liberty and security from the other side of the border. We need to be protected from those evil outsiders. Therefore, I will endorse and participate in an even more invasive degree of surveillance and a more draconian degree of policing.

That’s the only way to keep the foreign bodies from infecting me and taking over. And the idea of the foreigners having any amount of power over me is significantly more frightening than the prospect of a domestic administration having unlimited authority to protect me.

Do you realize we are allowed to discuss and criticize things around the world whether or not America is guilty of something similar right?

It becomes tiresome to read “Foreign Country is doing the EVIL THING! Rally around the burn pit and lets talk about how intrinsically bad their are!” when they learned this shit by watching every other western country do it first. Just feels like another edition of American Exceptionalism and hysterical far-right xenophobia.

The CCP are actively engaging in genocide

It always gets me to see how Americans treated Afghanistan for 23 years, only to find religion when they see China doing the same Radical Islamic Extremism crack downs the Ted Cruz masterbates to in the middle of the night.

Literally right on the other side of the border! Practically the same dudes. And we outright applauded China for helping us with the genocide under Bush, when we were applauding Russia for the same shit in Chechnya no less.

But now we’re out of there, and in between kicking off massive famines and looting their Treasury, we’ve decided to care about Uyghurs now.

But it is still night and day in terms of horror.

More black and white.

It’s not called The China Man’s Burden, ffs. Who do they even think they are?

Anyway, back to explaining to Houthis why we don’t have health care by blowing up another elementary school in Yemen.

At some point, its just tiring to see folks slam their fists in their palms and declare whole-heartedly “I will NEVER visit China for ANY REASON!” when half our country is broke as shit and our planes occasionally just have the doors fall off mid-flight.

As if you were booking a vacation to Macau ten minutes ago, but now you’ve suddenly changed your mind. Come the fuck on, dude.

It doesn’t matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP

Unfortunately, there’s this baseline understanding of liberal western democracies providing security while eastern fascist dictatorships of the proletariat are looking for people to punish arbitrarily. The tolerance for British mass surveillance (some of the worst in the world) is sky high, simply because they’re doing it the white way.

Love to live in a country where my data is always secure and my government would never try to harvest my data in bulk. Liberty! Whiskey! Sexy! USA! USA!