You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?

Well, they didn’t specifically feel concern for them electing a despot. They were concerned simply that they might pick wrong from the viewpoint of those with political power at the time. They weren’t specifically afraid of a despot or demagogue, but someone who would either threaten the political elites wellbeing, or loosing support from the “less populous” slave states. A system that gives disproportionate weight to smaller states to buy their support while also giving themselves more influence over a check on the legislature and one of the branches of power is what they went with.

They weren’t afraid of Trump, they were concerned about Lincoln.

It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.

A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn’t entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say “nah” to legislation.

This is for the primary. This means that people can vote for a more progressive candidate as their first choice and have their second choice be for the “safe” candidate.

The winner of the Democratic presidential primary is almost certainly always going to be a Democrat. There’s almost nothing you can do to change that.

Beyond that, they can do multiple things so doing w good thing doesn’t mean they didn’t do something else.
How do you propose they fix gerrymandering, a state level issue affecting the election of representatives, or citizens United, a supreme Court ruling, via the procedural rules of the party presidential primary? It’s like saying there’s no point brushing your teeth if you have credit card debt.

It’s super annoying, because that term should belong to “if you’ve got an hour we can grab coffee and I’ll explain my politics to you. You don’t? Uhh … ‘rather to the left’?”, and not “I’m fine with the gays and poors, but I don’t know if I’m comfortable with the government helping or protecting them”.

It’s really not new age reconning, the old testament literally has angels and other quasi devine entities in it. It’s not that they thought the foreign gods were demons, it’s that they had stories from their own religion that involved other gods.
Previously, it was common for nations and tribes to have their own God that they worshipped.
A segment of the Israelites believed that their national diety was best God, but not only God, because that would be silly. Everyone know El, Ashera, Yahweh and Marduk all exist, but Yahweh is first amongst the pantheon, or that Yahweh was actually the same as the other god but just used a different name for reasons.
When political strife broke out with Babylon that sect gained prominence and shifted towards monotheism as a rejection and denunciation of the Babylonian gods, both as a middle finger to Babylon and as a bolstering of national identity: preserve the culture by saying it’s not just that this is your God, or that’s it’s the best God, but that it’s the only God.
The difficult part is the thousand years of stories and belief making it extremely clear that there are other deities. So those stories warped and recontextualized those gods as evil gods or lesser good gods, errr… Demons and angels. A perfect, all powerful, all knowing god who created everything has special helpers to do things for him and has an adversary who is somehow able to resist him, but is also a companion, or a betrayal. Baal. Or is is baelzebub? Samael? Satan? It’s so tricky to keep track of which came from early Judaism and which is a syncretism from a neighboring religion.

You slightly underestimate how broad the world of the Israelites was. They lived in tribes, but those tribes had a diety different from a neighbor tribe that they still recognized as “them”. Different households would have their own God, and the nation as a whole had a patron God. They lived in areas with enough traffic and people that other gods wasn’t a weird notion. Their interactions with Babylon are a significant recognized historical occurrence, and Babylon had a population of more than 200,000 by modern estimates during the relevant time period.

It’s confusing to say that it’s ignoring the social control aspect of religion to recognize that they weren’t monotheistic at the time the ten commandments became part of the religious canon. It took a thousand years for them to switch from a subset of the Canaanite religion to a distinct monotheistic one.
The purpose wasn’t to stop people from making their own gods, it was to stop people from saying any of them were better than Yahweh. It is not a subtle set of rules.

It’s a coherent argument built on the flawed premise that the interpretation of the text as applied to modern Judaism is the same as it was applied to the proto-judaism of 3500 years ago. We have ample evidence that it would not have, and that time has changed the interpretation and, in some cases, the actual words, like the written form of Yahweh that would be pronounceable in their language being changed to an honorific and subsequently lost to time.

It’s less to stop worshipping fake gods, or asserting they’re monotheistic, it’s a directive to stop saying any God is “better” than Yahweh. At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety, and eventually that started to include taking attributes from the other deity’s in the pantheon, and eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels. Lesser devine entities strictly below Yahweh. Add in a couple centuries of linguistic drift and religious practice and you’ve got yahwehs name being replaced with “the LORD” in many places to avoid invoking the special power of names, and his name becoming your word for deity, making translation an absolute mess.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief. At the time it was and they only thought one god was worthy of worship.

It depends on which type of ai upscaling is being used.
Some are basically a neural net that understands how pixelation works with light, shadow, and color gradients and can work really well. They leave the original pixels intact, figure out the best guess for the gaps using traditional methods and then correct the guesses using feedback from the neural net.
Others are way closer to “generate me an image that looks exactly the same as this one but had three times the resolution”. It uses a lot more information about how people look (in photos it was trained on) than just how light and structure interact.

The former is closer to how your brain works. Shadow and makeup can be separated because you (in the squishy level, not consciously) know shadows don’t do that, and the light reflection hints at depth and so on.
The latter is more concerned with fixing “errors”, which might involve changing the original image data if it brings the total error down, or it’ll just make up things that aren’t there because it’s plausible.

Inferring detail tends to look nicer, because it’s using information that’s there to fil the gaps. Generating detail is just smearing in shit that fits and tweaking it until it passes a threshold of acceptability.
The first is more likely to be built into a phone camera to offset a smaller lens. The second is showing up a lot more to “make your pictures look better” by tweaking them to look like photos people like.

Nope, this one is real, just weird looking people and poorly upscaled.

News article from 2016: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/11/obamacare-repeal-republicans-president-obama-veto-health-column/78597014/

Original image:

Reference portion that was particularly mangled:

Mangled, but still recognizable as just … Funny looking people.

Except for this guy:

He doesn’t seem to have been mangled at all. Just looks real weird.

Well that’s sort of my point. Once you go down the military coup path it’s hard to get out.

What does that have to do with what I said, which was about how a military coup is bad?

Whether you’re right or wrong, it’s just unrelated to what I said.

Well, it’s also part of the oath the civilian leadership takes, for what it’s worth.

Point is, you want the military to say “you can’t tell me to do that” and not “I won’t let you do that”.
The latter is the military exerting power over the civilian government, which is a deeply dangerous precedent.

The best scenario we can hope for is for generals to simply refuse an illegal order, and when told to retire, refuse, and when reassigned to also refuse on the grounds that it’s illegal punishment for refusing an illegal order.

Anything more and you’re in coup territory, which sets the precedent that the military can step in and “correct” civilian government when it’s wrong in their view. See, for example, Myanmar. Even after the military relinquished control to allow democracy, they still decided to “correct” that democracy when it started to drift from their wishes.

Eeeh. First, “mad tyrant” is a bit of a stretch. The crown was, by the standards of the time, much more lax with the colonies than other territories. More of a “late onset bipolar disorder constitutional monarch acting under advisement of qualified ministers”. Breaking away to try “not monarchy” and implement much of what we now consider modern government was by no means wrong, but it’s not quite the clear cut battle against evil the founding narrative describes.

Second, that was 250 years ago. Just about the only lingering effect is the slogan which has some inspirational qualities.

The bigger thing is that the military hasn’t fought against a technological equal in decades, and has never fought an asymmetrical war against a technological equal. If the opponent is close to technological parity, they use overwhelming force to remove that parity, and then fight from there. They can’t do that against the US, because they need those resources as well. Additionally, most of our defensive strategy relies on it being impossible to attack us in a reasonable way. The only force that can get here has to be small and sneaky. In a civil war situation, a significant number of military facilities are basically inside cities. They have defenses, but not the way they do in an overseas base. And being in cities, a significant number of pretty important sites are inside the areas that are currently being designated as hostile.
All the people doing the boring logistics and paperwork that drives most of the US military have to commute through the dangerous areas. Most of their families live nearby.

You do know that Puerto Rico has voted to stay, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_political_status_for_Puerto_Rico

They’re Americans in the way that they’re fully enfranchised US citizens in every way.

Up until the 1960s they had the same legal status as residents of Washington DC. The only reason it hasn’t changed is because they’ve consistently asked for it not to.

Are you hoping Puerto Rican terrorists killing mainlanders will cause Puerto Ricans to vote for independence?

To make it even more WTF, the religions they have the most issue with don’t even have a different diety, just different people saying he told them an updated message on the rules of life.

Israel is required to exist for some interpretations of Armageddon in the Bible. They hate them, but they need Israel to exist because it’s central to moving forward with the end of the world and their gods cleansing of the forces of evil and the ushering in of a new world order.

So keep that fun fact in mind when you hear Christians being really pro Israel.

I wouldn’t say it’s ignoring it. I’m incredulous that DHS would pressure Facebook to cancel an account or something for the same reason I’m not as bothered by it happening: it doesn’t have real consequences.

If the government censors you, it can take your money or your freedom. Not only does it have much higher stakes, it has stakes you can’t get around. You can’t go to a platform that doesn’t mind and keep going.

If the government leans on a company, first of all that’s still government censorship and it’s not legal for the government to get a company to do what it cannot. If the specifics of the behavior are legal, it’s still government censorship and wrong (with aforementioned caveats).
That being said, the consequence of that type of censorship is loss of a social media account. You can find another venue and all they can do is keep asking people to remove the content. If someone refuses or you host overseas, there’s not really anything they can do.

There’s a benefit to society, in my opinion, for people to reject an idea. Refusing to help someone spread a message is about the most passive way to do that.

I’ve worked in the webhosting industry. If someone has a Nazi website and they need tech support, you need to ask yourself if you’re willing to take that support request or if you’re letting your manager know you’re not gonna help that message.
If the employees at a company don’t want to help you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I have a really hard time saying that it’s wrong to tell Nazis to take their website elsewhere.

I’m not aware of the specifics of that group to know how I feel.

My feelings are more born from looking at webhosting and hate/harassment websites. I have a really hard time saying it’s wrong to take down a Nazi website.
I don’t think the government should be able to, because as abhorrent as it is it’s still a political position and protected. But if the people you’re paying to host your shit don’t want anything to do with you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I don’t think society gains anything by forcing them to keep it up.

I also don’t think that applies to monopolies, quasi or defacto.

I think there’s a benefit to telling hateful groups and people they aren’t welcome in civil society. The alternative is to say that there’s no line at which society can tell you to gtfo, and people just need to tolerate you no matter what.
Shunning or deplatforming is how you do that without violence.

The grammar is ambiguous, FYI, of if you meant the censorship done by collective shout or the censorship being done to collective shout.

It doesn’t impact my reply, but I figured I’d let you know. :)

I’m against government censorship in all circumstances outside the cliche “you can’t threaten people or spread injurious falsehoods”.

I’m okay with private entities not giving people a platform if they aren’t a defacto institution. Credit card companies and financial services should be agnostic to which legal businesses they process payments and hold assets for. Much like how shipping companies are agnostic to what’s in your package, beyond what’s necessary to move it safely.
If you’re needed for society to function, I want you to blindly service society, even if people I dislike also get service.

I don’t want to be in a place where every platform needs to accept all participants as valid. There’s plenty of ways to share your viewpoint.