I mean, no, he doesn’t, but he was getting that attention long before he became openly fascist. And that makes him a huge problem now that he is.

Same difference.

The first thing Musk did when he took over is un-ban many of those people. He’s since repeatedly banned progressive journalists, added the word “cis” to the hate speech filters, and made numerous other changes to the way the site operates to boost those voices and suppress opposing ones.

He’s not the only one to blame, to be sure, but if you think he hasn’t been spearheading the effort, you haven’t been paying attention. He’s been backing them and a whole lot more.

Is the Pope Catholic? Our new investigation up next.

Reminds me of the Parable of the Drowning Man

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”

“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”

God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

One, the Republican party needs to pivot, or die, frankly. They’ve gone so far down the fascist rabbit hole at this point that they’re a danger to the very fabric of this country. Perhaps if they couldn’t get away with chiefly appealing to a minority of this country, that would push them to do so.

Two, the idea of the current system serving the rural/urban divide is a complete lie. Do you think the people of Kern County, CA are served by the electoral college? Do you think the people of San Antonio, TX are? No, they are completely and utterly ignored because they happen to be in states that vote the other way. To say nothing of the fact that the people who generally do vote with their state are ignored almost as much, because they can be taken for granted.

If you want every American to count, then you need to count every American. And if that upsets some people who have gotten used to welding outsized power over the rest of us and now think that’s their birthright, oh fucking well.

Yeah, get that Judeo- part out of there. Jews don’t use anything even resembling the King James Bible at all. This shit is purely Christian shit.

How do the actions of the prompter differ from the actions of someone who commissions an artist to create a work of art?

Ah, but there is a fundamental difference there. A photographer takes a picture, they do not tell the camera to take a picture for them.

It is the difference between speech and action.

Because it wasn’t created by a human being.

If I ask an artist to create a work, the artist owns authorship of that work, no matter how long I spent discussing the particulars of the work with them. Hours? Days? Months? Doesn’t matter. They may choose to share or reassign some or all of the rights that go with that, but initial authorship resides with them. Why should that change if that discussion is happening not with an artist, but with an AI?

The only change is that, not being a human being, an AI cannot hold copyright. Which means a work created by an AI is not copyrightable. The prompter owns the prompt, not the final result.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/love-bombing

So what you’re saying is that the AI is the artist, not the prompter. The AI is performing the labor of creating the work, at the request of the prompter, like the hypothetical art student you mentioned did, and the prompter is not the creator any more than I would be if I kindly asked an art student to paint me a picture.

In which case, the AI is the thing that gets the authorial credit, not the prompter. And since AI is not a person, anything it authors cannot be subjected to copyright, just like when that monkey took a selfie.

Dude is a manipulative creep. He spent years stalking her, love-and-money-bombed her and her family to get her affection, then used drugs to control her until they killed her.

If you think anything he did is remotely normal, I feel sorry for the women in your life.

So he’s an artist in the sense that a guy with a sledgehammer is a builder.

“artist”

I think Kristofferson would be slightly annoyed by that comparison.

As long as each of those ballots is filled out by an individual who is registered and legally able to vote, and is sealed by that person before it is handed off to whoever, I’m OK with this. I might rib them about their rank hypocrisy, but if they’re not falsifying ballots, they’re not really doing anything wrong.

Seriously, the idea of “ballot harvesting” is bullshit invented by people who just want to make it harder for people to vote because they’re afraid the people might vote against them.

Possibly. He probably could vote by mail if he thinks to request a ballot, but he might think he’ll be out by election day, or he might not trust mail ballots thanks to the Fanta Menace demonizing them.

BTW, the thing with felons voting is state by state, so it’s not a universal thing. Some states allow felons to vote once they’ve completed their sentence, and I think there’s even a couple that allow felons to vote from prison.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure most people aren’t going to cooperate in their own execution.

This isn’t like assisted suicide/euthanasia. These are, by definition, people being forced into this by the state. At least some portion of them are always going to be uncooperative.

The problem with that is, no anesthesiologist will work on an execution (something about “do no harm”), and properly sedating someone without one is more difficult than it appears to be.