donuts

Armed with what?

Guns, knives, blunt weapons, tasers, bear spray, hand cuffs and zip ties.

Taking the stand in the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four associates, Terry Cummings showed jurors an AR-15 firearm and an orange box for ammunition that he contributed to the so-called quick reaction force the Oath Keepers had staged at the hotel outside of Washington in case they needed weapons.

“I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military,” said Cummings, a veteran who joined the Oath Keepers in Florida in 2020.

https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-florida-virginia-conspiracy-government-and-politics-6ac80882e8cf61af36be6c46252ac24c

But a review of the federal charges against the alleged rioters shows that they did come armed, and with a variety of weapons: stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs. An additional suspect also allegedly planted pipe bombs by the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties the night before the riot and remains at large.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters-were-armed-here-are-the-weapons-prosecutors-say-they-used

Online sleuths who have aided in hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions say he is the same man they identified to the FBI who is currently individual No. 200 on the bureau’s Capitol Violence page, which he first appeared on three years ago. Videos and photographs from the Capitol on Jan. 6 showed him with what appears to be a gun in his waistband. As NBC News previously reported, that man, John Emanuel Banuelos, told Salt Lake City police that he was at the Capitol and had been captured on film with a gun. “I was in the D.C. riots,” he told the investigators, according to a police transcript. “I’m the one in the video with the gun right here.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/new-jan-6-footage-appears-show-rioter-firing-gun-air-capitol-attack-rcna138137

And I recall Hillary’s plot to get electors to “vote their concious”

The source you’ve linked quotes Martin Sheen and other “celebrities”, not Hillary Clinton, who conceded the election as someone who believed in democracy would (despite being much more popular than Trump and winning the national vote by millions).

Also, you should know that official electors are not always bound. As a Trump voter I know you’re not big on education or knowledge, but if you want you can read all about unpledged electors here.

Meanwhile, what Trump and his gang of indicted co-conspirators did was to submit a slate of fraudulent and fake electors to the election certification process in order to literally steal swing state electoral college votes and appoint himself President. Or as he likes to say “dictator on day one”.

Here’s a list of the names of the fraudulent electors in each state that Trump tried to overthrow.

Just because he wasn’t charged with treason doesn’t mean he didn’t commit treason by advocating an armed insurrection against our democracy. (See: the US post-Civil War Reconstruction Era for further examples.)

And if you want to why he wasn’t charged for that, it’s because of Republican Special Counsel Ken Starr’s disastrous opinion that sitting presidents are above the law and can’t be prosecuted, and must instead be impeached–which, if you remember, Trump was, not once but twice. Of course now Trump is arguing that he’s still above the law and deserves “total immunity”, which only further shows that he is, in fact, a wanna-be dictator.

Saying “Trump wasn’t charged with a crime so therefore he did nothing wrong” and “Trump can’t be charged with a crime because current and former US Presidents must have total immunity from prosecution” is very clearly circular logic.

He didn’t hurt your democracy though, he didn’t try to keep the opposition off the ballot.

Yeah he just repeatedly called the election rigged and tried to replace the Biden electoral votes with Trump ones by means of an armed insurrection.

But hey, he failed (just like how he fails at everything else) so no harm no foul. That’s how law and society work, right?

The majority of American elections are winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post races decided with plurality voting. Among other things, this means that if you are voting for someone outside of the realm of the statistical possibility for victory, you are simply throwing your vote away. That is the way the system works today, whether we like it or not, and wasting my vote by writing in Bugs Bunny or whatever isn’t actually a reasonable, productive, grown-up, or intelligent thing to do–especially not in the face of impending autocratic fascism.

In other words, the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election will either be Joe Biden (D) or Donald Trump ®. Of those two, I can easily pick Joe Biden as the person I would like to see running the country, controlling the US nuclear arsenal, and watching over the western world. Again, it’s an easy choice for me. As someone who does probably too much research and overthinking into voting, I’ve never had an easier choice.

But hey, if you’re like me and you don’t like the current American two-party political system, then I encourage you to vote for democratic reforms like Ranked Choice Voting, STAR voting, approval voting, etc. Multiple states have implemented better, more democratic voting systems, and more will hopefully continue to in future years, because unsurprisingly they are almost all better and more democratic than plurality voting.

I understand what you mean, and people should get a chance to vote in the primaries for the person who they think is best, but Biden is the incumbent, and he’s out there winning primaries with like >85% of the vote. Hell, he even won the write-in campaign in Iowa. ( That’s to say nothing of him winning against more than a dozen other, younger candidates in 2020. ) Marianne Williamson is the only other candidate to regularly crack 1%, and she’s not exactly “president material” if you ask me.

It’s going to Biden vs Trump. Two old ass white dudes who aren’t exactly sharp (though Trump is most certainly dumber, weirder and not to mention a fucking criminal fascist). For me, that makes it the easiest choice of my year.

Good for him. Nobody should be forced to fight in a war they don’t believe in.

I could say that the head of psychiatry at Tel Aviv hospital who is treating the people in question (people who were, in a matter of obvious and well-documented fact, taken hostage by Hamas) is a reliable source. Certainly they’re more reliable than you are.

For example?

I’ll always be on the side of the innocent. Innocent Palestinians who are caught up in a war between Netenyahu’s IDF and Hamas terrorists. Innocent Israelis who have been murdered, kidnapped and taken hostage by Hamas terrorists who were propped up for decades by far-right Israeli politicians.

You have nothing. No response but made-up straw-man accusations. You would be embarrassed if you weren’t completely incapable of shame and logic.

If there is no justice, there can be no peace.

Oh ok, “no peace”… So then you want war in Gaza.

Good luck with your war, amigo.

It’s only hard to believe victims when you don’t want to believe them.

We saw people captured and murdered by Hamas terrorists with out very eyes. They were taken into Gaza, which very soon became a war zone. They, as in the victims themselves, have provided first hand accounts of trauma, physical abuse, sexual assault, torture, and many of them are still being treated in hospitals for that trauma.

So what exactly are you contesting here? Are you trying to say that innocent people weren’t and aren’t kidnapped and being held by Hamas terrorists? Or maybe you’re trying to say that they were treated like kings over the last months since October 7th…?

“Safe space”, huh? You argue like Ron Desantis.

Next thing you’ll be calling me “woke” because you clearly don’t have a leg to stand on or a brain to think with.

Of the 14 hostages treated by Eitan’s team, nine are under 18 and two are under 10. Most need long-term treatment for trauma.

Go ahead and explain to us how 9 teens and 2 children are guilty of oppressing anyone.
Or maybe you hear “jew” in your head and can’t help but create some kind of twisted mental image?

Either way, I’ll wait for your top mind to come up with an answer, because I just love a good laugh.

Removed by mod

They’re either too stupid to read or too biased to read.

Either way, they’re probably beyond help at this point. It’s frankly just sad at this point.

What the fuck are you even talking about? Seriously, did you even take 3 minutes to read the article?

These people, who were (and still are) being taken captive by Hamas, are not “the oppressors” by any stretch.

They are innocent people (in this case women and children) who were taken captive by terrorists and murderers, brought into a terrifying war zone, physically and sexually abused, drugged without consent, kept in 1x1.5 animal cages, kept in pitch black darkness, deprived of food, water, medication, and never knowing whether they or their families are going to die.

You shouldn’t have to choose between sympathy to the innocent people of Gaza who are suffering in this war, and the innocent people of Israel who are also suffering. The fact that you even feel the need to “choose a side” or complain about media bias here is a stain on your soul and you should be fucking ashamed of that.

Happy New Year, bitch.

You probably shouldn’t have…

Among the 14 freed hostages treated at her centre, she said, were child hostages who had been drugged by their captors – including with ketamine – and were suffering from withdrawal, those who had subjected to or witnessed sexual abuse, a woman who had been kept in a tiny [1 x 1.5m, with another woman] cage, and another who had a breakdown after being kept in complete darkness for days.

Rather than picking a side between the IDF and Hamas, be on the side of the innocent people on both sides of this war who are victims of unspeakable atrocities. It’s not hard for me. It shouldn’t be hard for you. And if it is, that speaks to the darkness of bias and hatred within you.

Copyright is an artificial restriction

All laws are artificial restrictions, and copyright law is not exactly some brand new thing.

AI either has to work within the existing framework of copyright law OR the laws have to be drastically overhauled. There’s no having it both ways.

What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves.

I’m a programmer and I actually spend most of my week writing GPLv3 code.

Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright. People (or their employer in some cases) own the code the right, and so they have the intellectual right to license that code under GPL or any other license that happens to be compatible with their code base. In other words I have the right to license my code under GPL, but I do not have the right to apply GPL to someone else’s code. Look at the top of just about any source code file and you’ll find various copyright statements for each individual code author, which are separate from the terms of their open source licensing.

I’m also an artist and musician and, under the current laws as they exist today, I own the copyright to any artwork or music that I happen to create by default. If someone wants to use my artwork or music they can either (a) get a license from me, which will likely involve some kind of payment, or (b) successfully argue that the way they are using my work is considered a “fair use” of copyrighted material. Otherwise I can publish my artwork under a permissive license like public domain or creative commons, and AI companies can use that as they please, because it’s baked into the license.

Long story short, whether it’s code or artwork, the person who makes the work (or otherwise pays for the work to be made on the basis of a contract) owns the rights to that work. They can choose to license that work permissively (GPL, MIT, CC, public domain, etc.) if they want, but they still hold the copyright. If Entity X wants to use that copyrighted work, they either have to have a valid license or be operating in a way that can be defended as “fair use”.

tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright

TLDR: Copyright and open source/data are not at odds with each other. FOSS code is still copyrighted code, and GPL is a relatively restrictive and strict license, which in some cases is good and in other cases not depending on how you look at it. This is not what I’m advocating, but the current copyright framework that everything in the modern world is based on.

If you believe that abolishing copyright entirely to usher in a totally AI-driven future is the best path forward for humanity, then you’re entitled to think that.

But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don’t get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they’re doing is fair use.)

And when you add it up and realize that “AI” is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won’t someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!

If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

That’s because I’m a human being. I’m acting on my own volition and while I’ve observed artwork, I’ve also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I’m not owned or beholden to any company.

“AI” “art” is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

All of these are factors in determining whether it’s fair to use someone else’s copyrighted material, which is why it’s fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it’s not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else’s copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

AI training is using people’s copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that’s absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people’s copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is “fair” under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don’t get to unilaterally decided what people’s art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

Take Spotify for example, artists don’t get paid a lot per stream and it’s arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it’s worth it to be on those platforms. That’s not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that’s because it probably is–another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

Well, why shouldn’t they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?

There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.

Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else’s copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.

So again, what makes AI “fair use” and why shouldn’t companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?

The most concise and convincing argument about any topic ever.