Daily Bard Digest 2024-08-18

At 08/18/24 22:05:18 in conservativeterrorism with a score of yall:

Hey there -

Reddit considers license plates to be PII, so we've had to take this down. Sorry for the inconvenience.

At 08/18/24 18:58:46 in conservativeterrorism with a score of 1 point:

We don't allow flame wars in this subreddit. Knock it off.

At 08/18/24 17:07:52 in politics with a score of yall:

Which requires that the US has prima facie evidence of those violations.

That law also does not supercede or have precedence over the US-Israel treaties. Even if the US State Department had prima facie evidence that Israeli units were committing human rights violations, and that Israel was going to keep supplying those units — the Leahy Laws would be unenforceable. Because international treaties are Constitutional level law. Which any one branch of government cannot unilaterally amend, repeal, change, stop, pause, etc.

At 08/18/24 17:09:36 in politics with a score of yall:

I apparently talk to walls with text generating capability and read-only sentiences

At 08/18/24 14:04:40 in politics with a score of yall:

Biden stopped providing 2000lbs in rafah. How can he do that

Because Rafah was declared by Israel to be a non-combat area, and under their control, and therefore under the terms of the treaties and international law, there were no terrorist activities and no military war actions applicable in that area for which munitions would be supplied.

By the language of the treaties. Not by Biden's choice. By the language of the treaties.

His own state department admitted

No they didn't. Employees of his state department resigned while stating that their consciences couldn't tolerate the involvement. That's not the same. You even cited the statement made by a former employee where he cited "US Laws & International Law" as forbidding the weapons transfer.

The bilateral treaties with Israel are Constitutional level law. They override any Federal, State, or local laws. They are the Supreme Law Of The Land. By definition, no US laws can forbid the weapons transfers.

International Law does. Not. Exist. Except. Where. Treaties. Exist. Between. Sovereign. States.

There is no world government that has the authority, power, or legal recognition under us law & the constitution to make it illegal for the US to provide weapons to Israel pursuant to the treaties. Not the UN, not the Geneva Conventions, nothing. The US of A is a Sovereign State.

Reagan blocked the supply of F-16s to Israel in 1983 because under the treaties, Israel was the aggressor against Lebanon. Israel's pretext for invading Lebanon was to attack the PLO. The PLO did not own, control, or operate any military infrastructure or equipment which an F-16 would legitimately be used against. Lebanon did. Under the treaties, military assistance provided by the US is for Defense.

Settling occupied territory is also Not Defense.

These were not decisions made by Presidents.

These are choices mandated by the language of treaties negotiated (often half a century ago) by the State Department, ratified by the Senate, and signed into effect (again: often more than half a century ago) by (often now-deceased) President(s).

To move towards meaningful reform, it is necessary to understand what is actually going on.

At 08/18/24 12:56:02 in politics with a score of yall:

You can't condition weapons beyond what has already been set in the treaties.

The reality is that under US law & Israeli law, Hamas is a foreign terrorist org & a military aggressor. If Hamas so much as fires a sewage pipe rocket across the border, or send a single vest bomber to a market, the treaties bring online everything Israel might ever want as aid from the US. Those are the conditions. Because Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under US Law & those treaties.

The treaties have the force of law of the Constitution. No single branch of government, office, or official has the power to unilaterally divert that aid or further condition that aid.

If people want the way the US sends aid to Israel to change, they only have to elect a Republican President & Republican Majority Congress — who will help Israel turn Gaza & the West Bank into vacation condos for the ultrawealthy — or elect a Democratic President & Democratic Majority Congress, who can make renegotiating aid treaties with Israel an accomplishable goal.

As long as we have a Republican President, a Republican House, or a Republican Senate, any attempt at appropriate reform will be refused.

At 08/18/24 12:57:34 in politics with a score of yall:

Or maybe succumbing to the rise of fascist tactics normalised by Trump & his followers is something that should be rejected.

It's not strength to use law enforcement to shoot protestors in the legs.

At 08/18/24 13:01:41 in politics with a score of yall:

No one ever said anything about Republicans

I did. I said it. Because it was Republican politicians who pored through everything ever written or posted to social media by student organisations to cherry-pick a single statement made by a student org with a dozen members, and to turn that into "all these protestors are domestic violent extremists radicalised by Hamas and encouraged by foreign states".

Because that's what happened about that.

At 08/18/24 13:04:13 in politics with a score of yall:

Biden is the one breaking the law

Which law? He's not breaking US law, and the US doesn't subject our politicians to international law, as a sovereign state.

At 08/18/24 13:07:56 in politics with a score of yall:

You know that people can read the article and understand that your claim about it is misleading, right?

At 08/18/24 13:08:52 in politics with a score of yall:

You know that people can read the article and understand that your claims are misleading, right?

At 08/18/24 13:18:08 in politics with a score of yall:

You know that federal laws cannot override the Constitution, right?

And you know that the treaties are law at the level of the Constitution, right?

So you know that laws passed by Congress can't override the language of the treaties, right?

And that therefore a President can't be breaking a federal law that contradicts the language of the treaties, and is therefore effectively unconstitutional, right?

It's really rare for people to understand exactly what is necessary to affect international treaties the United States has entered into.

Most of the arguments that circulate are premised on false ideas that Congress can pass a law which changes the treaties (they can't - they can only pass laws which "implement" the treaties, which can't contradict the treaties), or on the false idea that the President can stop sending the aid the treaties mandate (can't) or that SCOTUS could order … (can't).

They are

International Treaties between Two Sovereign States, which the US Constitution has language about treaties, setting them above the reach of any single government entity.

To change or "condition" those treaties, requires state-level renegotiation of those treaties. Not POTUS. Not Congress. Not the State Department, not a General, not an independent agency. The State.

They will either be changed by making new treaties (which is possible under Democratic majority chambers of Congress & a Democratic President) or they will be changed by an overthrow of the US Government or they will be changed by Israel repudiating them. Only one of these is realistic.

If you do not understand what the realities of the situation are, you will only succeed in spreading misinformation, anger, frustration, and sabotaging real efforts to make a difference.

At 08/18/24 13:23:30 in politics with a score of yall:

Read the articles

Yeah, I read them. When they were published. I help run multiple groups on Reddit that fight hate groups, terrorism, and violent extremism.

Your assertions are bunk.

At 08/18/24 13:24:05 in politics with a score of yall:

See my other response.

At 08/18/24 13:27:38 in politics with a score of yall:

Let me restate —

Most of the arguments that circulate are premised on false ideas that Congress can pass a law which changes the treaties (they can't - they can only pass laws which "implement" the treaties, which can't contradict the treaties), or on the false idea that the President can stop sending the aid the treaties mandate (can't) or that SCOTUS could order … (can't).

They are International Treaties between Two Sovereign States, which the US Constitution has language about treaties, setting them above the reach of any single government entity.

To change or "condition" those treaties, requires state-level renegotiation of those treaties. Not POTUS. Not Congress. Not the State Department, not a General, not an independent agency.

Only The State.

They will either be changed by making new treaties (which is possible under Democratic majority chambers of Congress & a Democratic President) or they will be changed by an overthrow of the US Government or they will be changed by Israel repudiating them.

Only one of these is realistic.

At 08/18/24 13:31:14 in politics with a score of yall:

Nope. Those "obvious" "hate" subreddits are subreddits taken over by my colleagues many years ago, to take them away from hate groups, long before Reddit had any rule against hatred and only rarely enforced the few then-existing rules to kick off violent extremists.

We keep them as proof, or as jokes, or to dive into their histories to research hate movements on Reddit a decade ago.

At 08/18/24 12:46:35 in politics with a score of yall:

It totally happened in the imaginations of Republican politicians, who have been absolutely blind to 70 years of anti-Semitism originating from their own party's power base. They desperately need enemies to fight and blame.

They seized on one statement by three Palestinian students to claim that all protestors were joining / acting on behalf of Hamas.

If they applied the same standard to their own political party, they should all be spending multiple lifetimes in prison for supporting countless incidents of domestic terrorism

At 08/18/24 09:50:26 in technology with a score of 1 point:

AI models have the extremism trained out of them

No. They have a set of front-end & back-end safeguards & filters that detect & redirect from extremist inputs & extremist outputs, but importantly, because these are human-written filters overlaid on the inputs & outputs, they are not capable of detecting all extremist prompts or directives, nor all extremist outputs, and can be circumvented by creative prompting & can be removed entirely by people hosting their own instances of the software. And the filters can only interdict overt, historically proven expressions.

They're still recommending putting glue on pizza. They've been trained on content that itself relies heavily on context, which context has been collapsed due to being distilled into a probabalistic model. And a huge quantity of what those models were trained on are unlabeled and undetected hate speech, harassment, violent threats, and antisocial tendencies

At 08/18/24 09:19:26 in technology with a score of 1 point:

it's also the kind of thing …

My comment was about one specific phenomenon — the radicalisation of angry young men into violent extremists, & a pipeline feeding stochastic terrorism. It's not a simplification — I've spent the last 8 years getting this phenomenon booted off social media sites

At 08/18/24 08:46:24 in TheRightCantMeme with a score of 1 point:

You should always assume that any rapidly spreading "viral" disease that has a WHO or USCDC or EEDC warning published about it,

is capable of being transmitted by air (coughed / sneezed droplets);

is capable of being transmitted through fomites - objects transmitting disease particles by contact

has "symptom free" infections in a non-negligible percent of cases (carriers)

This is not to say that they are transmitted that way, it's to say that for the purposes of keeping yourself protected from transmission vectors, you should assume these things.

Health officials / the media / etc assumed that someone had to be coughed on, sneezed on, or gladhanded by someone infected with Covid-19 & then touched their mouth / nose / eyes.

Researchers later proved that the Covid viral particles could ride microscopic vapor particles around a room for hours.

And for every person that contracts a viral disease, it has literally trillions upon trillions of opportunities to mutate into a more infectious and/or more severe form.

And fatality rates vary between 1% and 10% — knowledge of fatality rates is hampered by poor health care infrastructure in Africa.

Bottom line:

Wear masks, avoid being indoors with people who you don't have to be indoors with, especially if they aren't wearing masks, wash and disinfect hands.

At 08/18/24 08:03:48 in technology with a score of 5 points:

It's also the kind of thing that happens to lonely, isolated, angry young men. The existence of other people who will socialise with them in some aspect, and their irrational actions in furtherance of maintaining that social contact, is literally the radicalisation pipeline. It's G*merGate & the alt-Right.

At 08/18/24 07:44:10 in Frickthealtright with a score of 1 point:

Read the room. This is /r/FrickTheAltRight, & Rule 3 here is

FOCUS

on the alt-right.

I am certain you do not wish to argue that several years ago you assaulted me at Tanglewood Forest. Several of your fellow company members have chased me and thwapped me with Amtgard -legal boffer weapons on Company Road while I was making announcements on behalf of Kingdom Officers.

Snapshots:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3anadz/what_does_being_triggered_mean_in_all_those/csedt1x/?context=8:

• undelete.pullpush.io

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)