California voter here. If Newsom wins the primary I will campaign for the Republican.
But please note that he's pre-emptively declared he won't run if Kamala runs[0]. He even admits this is because they're both backed by the same groups and share the same donor network[1]. So there's at least one more Democrat you simply should not vote for.
[1]: Quote from above article: "The governor said he would not want to force a contest against the former vice president, noting that the two share many political allies and supporters."
Yeah, I had to hold my nose to vote for Harris, and I don't look forward to the continued dominance of that wing of the party. The good thing about Harris running instead of Newsom is that she's less likely to win the nomination. I hope primary voters are as fed up with the corporate Democratic party as the country in general is.
> The good thing about Harris running instead of Newsom is that she's less likely to win the nomination.
That's a good point.
What scares me about Newsom is that, outside of California, Newsom's corruption, broken promises, and policy failures are totally unknown. He's just the handsome guy with all those great anti-Trump zingers. And as a relatively young white man, he might be seen as a demographically "safe" choice for primary voters burnt by their experience with Hillary and Kamala.
> I hope primary voters are as fed up with the corporate Democratic party as the country in general is.
I think a good chunk of them are. The question is really, who can win both the Democratic nomination and the general election?
AOC is the obvious choice for the DSA faction, but I'm deeply skeptical she can win in the general. The corporate faction seems dead set on Newsom or Kamala. If Kamala can somehow eke out a primary victory, she's gonna crash and burn badly in the general. And I don't see anyone else suddenly appearing as a viable candidate.
So from where I'm sitting, it looks like Democrats' most likely path to victory goes through Newsom. And I think his corruption and inevitably poor governance will discredit the Democratic party for a generation and catapult MAGA--perhaps another Trump--back into power. Then we'll be properly fucked.
Ossoff isn't my first choice, but I believe a charming, good looking, southern white man, who isn't afraid to call a Nazi a Nazi, might have a pretty good shot at both the nomination and the general (though I think AOC is also a strong contender, she's popular nationwide). It's early, yet, but if Democrats can't win a state or two in the south, they're going to have a hard time taking the White House. The northern "blue wall" simply aint (it started falling apart almost immediately after it was named, and Trump hammered the nail through its heart).
If so, the guy needs to get his name and message out there pronto. I don't hear jack shit about him, so he clearly sucks at gaining attention, and that's one thing both Trump and AOC excel at. These days, that seems to matter more than almost anything else.
> It's early, yet, but if Democrats can't win a state or two in the south, they're going to have a hard time taking the White House.
The Democrats are going to have a hard time taking the White House. Full stop. The electoral map isn't pretty. And if current trends continue, it's gonna become almost impossible for a Democrat to win the Presidency after the next reapportionment.
> The northern "blue wall" simply aint
Preach. It was always a delusion. Democrats have a long history of taking their voters for granted. Then, of course, they are shocked when they give them the finger. Unfortunately I don't see this changing any time soon. The DSA faction seems similarly aloof, in their own way.
If you don't want Democrats to lose, figure out how to keep someone like Newsom off the ballot. You've all got two years to settle on someone who isn't odious.
And yet self-reliance is a virtue for nation-states, too. Every serious country on the planet has an agricultural and industrial policy specifically calibrated to ensure adequate domestic production of essential goods and services.
There's a happy medium somewhere between Juche and just-in-time rawdogging global markets.
> some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah
Can you please remind me where they finally found Yahya Sinwar? And was that before or after they "level[ed] the city"? Do you think they would have found him if they left the city untouched? Why was he there in the first place?
> And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them
Hamas isn't following a ceasefire; they've been militarily degraded.
There's a causal relationship here: If the IDF hadn't destroyed so many fighting positions and booby-trapped buildings, there would have been many, many more attacks and IDF soldiers KIA.
You say "there's no justification" but unwittingly go on to point out exactly why it's justified.
Well, Israel certainly doesn't intend to destroy Arabs, Muslims, or brown-skinned people more broadly, and you can't honestly claim "Palestine" is a nation:
- no defined territory--and certainly none widely recognized
- no unique language or ethnicity
- a culture only distinguished from Egypt and the Levant by their penchant for terrorism
- a history that only meaningfully diverged from their neighbors within the last half-century, and which divergence springs entirely from their consistent unwillingness to pursue peace with Israel
So even if Israel had the intent to commit genocide--which, unfortunately[1], they don't--the Arabs in Gaza don't qualify as a distinct group that can be subjected to genocide.
If Colombia had decided to annihilate the FARC, just kill them all--would that have qualified as a genocide, too? It seems to me they meet at least as many tests for nationhood.
> At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
> All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
> When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing
> So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
That's not an argument.
> Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
Who made that argument? They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it, although some sure do have murderous beliefs but that's besides the point.
> Then why is it taking so long?
Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them. When they go too fast Western governments get public pressure, when it's slow nothing of importance happens.
Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
> They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it
They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened? You say, "that's not an argument," but I think it is. If we accept your claims, then it follows that Israel has had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill everyone in Gaza for years (at least).
The fact that they still haven't done that suggests that your claims are false.
> Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them.
Ah, so it's just international pressure holding them back. Right.
I don't buy it. Israel has hardly shown itself to be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions. And at the end of the day, they are a nuclear power and functionally immune to military threats from rational actors. If the IDF started the genocide tomorrow ain't nobody gonna do shit about it.
Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
> Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
The questions needed to be asked at all because it was your comment that was of the lowest caliber. All smoke and no fire.
> They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened?
The same can be said for any conflict in which one side has overwhelming capacity and does not choose to engage on it for various reasons. But yes, diplomacy and public pressure actually matter a lot, as evidenced by the fact that Israel spends billions of dollars in state propaganda and funding political campaigns in the West to continue to receive military aid and avoiding sanctions.
You are saying that Israel has shown itself to not be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions yet it engaged for decades in political and diplomatic action to be where it is today; it was not looked at that favorably by Western powers even a few decades backs. And it understands that apartheid South Africa was not on anyone's radar for decades until it was. AIPAC and other lobbying agencies fund hundreds of political campaigns in the US in order for this to happen.
So yeah, if in five years' time the Democratic Socialists end up overtaking establishment DNC Zionists and get their share of power such that they allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time, as evidenced by their desire to have the US engage Iran without them participating directly because they are not actually as powerful militarily as they project themselves to be.
> Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
That works until it doesn't, much like how China did not dominate on renewable energies until it did, or how proprietary Unix dominated the server market until Linux appeared. It takes remarkably little time to turn a country into a pariah state. For the past two decades Germany theorized that economic connections to Russia would prevent them from doing anything stupid regarding Ukraine.
And Israel does not just have to care about external issues. Economic sanctions hit economies hard, and even a recession is enough to turn the tables against candidates during election years, so given that certain political parties are the ones who hold the cards at any time, they are not keen to lose elections.
Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime or any loss of trust such that no amount of lobby money suffices to get profitable military or high-tech contracts.
And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East, so being politically associated with the West is very much a matter of survival. In this sense they have all the time in the world to perform their campaign of ethnic cleansing to restore Eretz Israel.
None of what I'm saying is speculation, this is very much what political analysts in Israel say and have been saying for decades. The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
> The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
Also it's a self-reinforcing cycle. The far right keeps testing what they can get away with, becoming increasingly emboldened. The leftists are packing up. Those in the middle see global backlash grow and realize there's no going back to pre-2023 world, so they might as well go all-in with the right. Israel is like a heroin addict using the very thing that's destroying them, in order to cope with the damage it already caused. Without intervention it generally doesn't end well.
Welcome to war. War is bad. Innocent people always get caught up in war and suffer from it. We should do our best to avoid war. But, unfortunately, due to a mix of game theoretical incentives, information asymmetry, and human nature, war isn't going away. We can still at least try to minimize innocents' suffering from war, though.
It was clearly a tragedy. Very few Americans--certainly I've never met one--support that strike in retrospect. Instead they are angry that such a terrible mistake was possible and they generally want a thorough investigation and targeting procedure reforms to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Americans hold their military to a high moral standard. But wars don't have to be fought so cleanly. Certainly the Golden Horde had no compunction about genocide. If acknowledging our shared humanity with innocent victims and expressing remorse for their deaths is ridiculed, then we're primed for a descent into nihilism, wanton cruelty, and mass slaughter.
This is probably the most important concept for "normies" to understand about AI, IMO. It's the stochastic brother of the deterministic Church-Turing thesis. Any function that can be computed can be computed on any computer. And that function can be approximated to an arbitrary degree of precision with a DNN.
The real kicker is DNNs are much easier to program than CPUs because they don't require a closed-form description ("a program") of the function to be approximated; you just throw a bunch of input/output pairs at the model, compute loss, backprop and update weights, repeat.
Hence the unslakeable thirst for input/output pairs, i.e. data.
> In the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that
> neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous
> function to any desired degree of accuracy. These theorems provide a mathematical
> justification for using neural networks, assuring researchers that a sufficiently large or
> deep network can model the complex, non-linear relationships often found in real-world data.[1][2]
>
> The best-known version of the theorem applies to feedforward networks with a single hidden
> layer. It states that if the layer's activation function is non-polynomial (which is true
> for common choices like the sigmoid function or ReLU), then the network can act as a
> "universal approximator." Universality is achieved by increasing the number of neurons in
> the hidden layer, making the network "wider." Other versions of the theorem show that
> universality can also be achieved by keeping the network's width fixed but increasing its
>This is probably the most important concept for "normies" to understand about AI, IMO. It's the stochastic brother of the deterministic Church-Turing thesis.
Your local normies appear to be oddly well versed in computer science... not sure that line would go down well at my local watering hole.
I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism.
The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker.
I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper.
Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.
But please note that he's pre-emptively declared he won't run if Kamala runs[0]. He even admits this is because they're both backed by the same groups and share the same donor network[1]. So there's at least one more Democrat you simply should not vote for.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/gavin-newsom-sa...
[1]: Quote from above article: "The governor said he would not want to force a contest against the former vice president, noting that the two share many political allies and supporters."