Heidi Blaubear?

From Senator Chris McDaniel: “Lately, some folks have taken to calling ICE “the Gestapo.” It sounds fierce. It feels righteous. But it isn’t true, and it isn’t harmless. The Gestapo was a secret police force. No warrants. No courts. No lawyers. And no appeals. People vanished in the night, not because they broke the law, but because the law no longer meant anything. The knock on the door was the sentence. ICE isn’t that. Not even close. ICE is a public agency enforcing laws passed by elected officials. Its agents file reports. They seek warrants. They lose cases. Judges stop them. Lawyers challenge them. Some detainees go home. That’s not tyranny. That’s bureaucracy, for better and worse. You can hate immigration policy. You can argue enforcement is too harsh, too sloppy, or too broad. You can work to have the law changed if you wish. That’s a republic doing what it’s supposed to do. But when you call ordinary law enforcement “the Gestapo,” you cheapen real evil. You turn history into a slogan and suffering into a metaphor. And once every badge is tyranny, no tyranny is left to recognize. In Mississippi, I was raised to believe words should earn their weight. This one hasn't yet. It throws around the language of dictatorship while living under a system where courts still rule, lawyers still argue, and the government still loses. That difference matters. Because the day enforcement becomes secret, unchecked, and answerable to no one, we won’t need to borrow names from history. We’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with. And we’ll wish we’d kept our words honest.”

“ICE isn’t the Gestapo. The Gestapo was…” (proceeds to describe qualities that apply to what ICE is currently doing)

very illustrative of how important (and beneficial) machiavelli can be for the development of a tolerable liberalism

absolute banger episode from the only* good liberal, @polphilpod.bsky.social

Hi, I’m Ross Douthat, welcome back to my ongoing series ‘ideas that flatter power are actually very deep and interesting’, brought to you, as always, by the power they flatter

i can see an argument along the lines of: “it’d be good but we should be cautious about blowback” voted becoming firm “should” voters when the revealed blowback was pretty minimal. was that what you had in mind?

**’surprisingly’ in the sense of: ‘i would have expected a different approach to have worked better.’ still surprising to me that the best translation software has basically no inbuilt sense of semantics or syntax.

Attention Is All You Need - Wikipedia

*exact origins are hard to pin down and ‘originally’ is probably too strong. but the current wave of transformer-only machine learning algorithms was kicked off by the landmark paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which looked at translation software en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenti...

LLM’s were originally* developed for translation and that is actually something they do extremely (and surprisingly**) well. one of the use cases for which they should exist.

early 30s (27-29)

more of a fan of ‘yelling at the left,’ i suppose ;)

on the other hand, at least at the level of emotional narratives, don’t you think Mamdani’s victory lends some credibility to the feeling that ‘Bernie would have won’? rather than putting it to bed

you mentioned “seeing liberals actively work with them” but that sounds like you’re living in a world where he got the NYT endorsement!! i got a very different picture of the campaign, and one which does much more to feed than to challenge my emotional gut aversion to liberals

having a hard time buying claims that the Zohran race (a) didn’t lean on criticism of big money in politics and (b) didn’t support the left’s narrative that democratic insiders will try to keep them out at any cost (including backing terrible candidates)

👍

i don’t really get the analogy there

mods. punch down on that guy

principles without tactics have led the social democratic left to some quite silly places in recent years, but tactics without principles seems to be leading the labour party down a very dark road

@polphilpod.bsky.social I really enjoyed your episode Fire The Generals, but it seems to me that Starmer is a bit of a cautionary tale against the mindset of “this isn’t a question about… the justice of this or that cause, this is just a question about how to win, because i would like to win”

(chuckling wisely) You fool... I am getting my ass kicked *strategically*

Shadow the Hedgehog, baby

I do not understand what some of you are talking about. But do I respect it? Not really

Superb parrot! This one’s half grown but well into its snaggly era

coffee empty?

a children's book featuring the badger Frances, with a jar of jam, some bread, utensils, etc. Frances is crying. The text reads: "Look! Frances has a big jar of jam. And a slice of bread. Frances says she LOVES bread and jam. So shy is she crying?"

Philosophers, you are good at "the big questions".

Why is Frances crying?