They were Ohio National Guard acting in the line of duty. Since then the Kent State incident is used in training as a counter example, how not to control a protest / riot.
Well, the 1984 bioterror attack associated with the Rajneeshee was done with salmonella. The question this raises is if there are any advantages to cultivating it as an assassin's weapon.
I'm not saying I know it is, only that the two associated deaths make for a pretty amazing coincidence.
The original trolley problem serves as a thought experiment to illustrate two points:
When holding a personal code (e.g. Batman's code against killing) can lead to a worse outcome, morality may not be so clear, and...
Sometimes incidental circumstances can influence how we interpret the situation, which can alter what we feel is the better choice. It's easier to pull a lever than to strongarm a big guy in front of the trolley, to personally gun down an innocent refugee or to carve up an innocent stranger to harvest their organs, even though the outcome is the same.
We can see real-world examples of how corruption sways officials from representing their constituency to representing plutocratic campaign contributors. They're often not making a moral decision, so much as making a decision informed by their own need to survive and continue their career. They might justify their decision with contrivance to soften the blow, but those who imagine themselves moral still know they're forced to abide by corrupting influences to keep their jobs. (We've had to watch while Representative Occasio-Cortez concede her values to preserve political influence over the last decade. It's ugly.)
Hence we have situations like the opening scene to Inglourious Basterds ( on Youtube ) in which a dairy farmer in occupied France has to decide between lying to Nazi Jew-hunters and preserving the well-being of his own family. Very often, we cannot afford to do the moral thing, for fear of personal consequences, even as we know we're only prolonging the time to our own eventual downfall.
Part of the problem is capitalist regimes keep sending assassins to murder leaders of communist movements, such as FBI killing the Black Panther leaders.
Law enforcement in the US is harassing mutual aid organizations. Maybe they're afraid we'll repair the park fences and deny some business a choice government contract?
As a note, fascism is a tool of industrialist plutocrats to extend the life of their power as worker class quality of life deteriorates. While Hoover was in power during the Great Depression, US industrialists were looking to Hitler and Mussolini while laborers were looking to the Soviet Union.
As per the Christian nationalist movement / transnational white power movement in the US, our dependence on capitalism has driven us to the verge of civil war, and a push by the Republican party to single-party autocracy and purges of undesirable demographics, including the impoverished and homeless.
I can't speak to Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu except to say autocracy always tends to go badly, with power consolidated until abuse and corruption is inevitable.
The whole idea behind communism is to imagine what a functional public serving state would look like, and then how to get there from here. Marx speculates on steps that might work to get to a starting point, but much like the framers of the Constitution of the United States, he didn't know everything and couldn't predict how it all plays out in given circumstances.
(US constitutional framers never did democracy before. They favored landowners. They assumed common homesteaders would be driven to understand and vote for their own best interests. And they got broadsided by the industrial revolution. Also, FPTP elections and two-party systems suck.)
We know civil wars tend to lead to serial dictatorships and foreign influencers looking to exploit economic vulnerability. We also grassroots mutual aid movements take generations and are prone to disruption by time and circumstances, particularly raiders and police forces. So we're still trying to chart the geography between here and utopia.
My goldendoodle puppy doesn't ever want to come back inside. I told my beagle "go get your sister" as I tried rounding up the puppy. Now when I say "go get your sister" the beagle runs to the puppy and baits her into chasing him into the house.
With my last dog, I would reward him with extra treats when the cat was also in the kitchen. The cat figured out he got treats whenever the dog and I were in the kitchen and now just joins me in the kitchen (on his stool) whenever I go there.
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...
It remains fascinating to me how these apps are being responded to in society. I'd assume part of the point of seeing someone naked is to know what their bits look like, while these just extrapolate with averages (and likely, averages of glamor models). So we still dont know what these people actually look like naked.
And yet, people are still scorned and offended as if they were.
Technology is breaking our society, albeit in place where our culture was vulnerable to being broken.
Not so much computers evil! as just acknowledging there will always be malicious actors who will find clever ways to use technology to cause harm. And yes, there's a gathering of folk on 4Chan/b who nudify (denudify?) submitted pictures, usually of people they know, which, thanks to the process, puts them out on the internet. So this is already a problem.
Think of Murphy's Law as it applies to product stress testing. Eventually, some customer is going to come in having broke the part you thought couldn't be broken. Also, our vast capitalist society is fueled by people figuring out exploits in the system that haven't been patched or criminalized (see the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008). So we have people actively looking to utilize technology in weird ways to monetize it. That folds neatly like paired gears into looking at how tech can cause harm.
As for people's faces, one of the problems of facial recognition as a security tool (say when used by law enforcement to track perps) is the high number of false positives. It turns out we look a whole lot like each other. Though your doppleganger may be in another state and ten inches taller / shorter. In fact, an old (legal!) way of getting explicit shots of celebrities from the late 20th century was to find a look-alike and get them to pose for a song.
As for famous people, fake nudes have been a thing for a while, courtesy of Photoshop or some other digital photo-editing set combined with vast libraries of people. Deepfakes have been around since the late 2010s. So even if generative AI wasn't there (which is still not great for video in motion) there are resources for fabricating content, either explicit or evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.
This is why we are terrified of AI getting out of hand, not because our experts don't know what they're doing, but because the companies are very motivated to be the first to get it done, and that means making the kinds of mistakes that cause pipeline leakage on sacred Potawatomi tribal land.
The current presumption that generative AI will replace workers is smoke and mirrors, though the response by upper management does show the degree to which they would love to replace their human workforce with machines, or replace their skilled workforce with menial laborers doing simpler (though more tedious) tasks.
If this is regarded as them tipping their hands, we might get regulations that serve the workers of those industries. If we're lucky.
In the meantime, the pursuit of AGI is ongoing, and the LLMs and generative AI projects serve to show some of the tools we have.
It's not even that we'll necessarily know when it happens. It's not like we can detect consciousness (or are even sure what consciousness / self awareness / sentience is). At some point, if we're not careful, we'll make a machine that can deceive and outthink its developers and has the capacity of hostility and aggression.
There's also the scenario (suggested by Randall Munroe) that some ambitious oligarch or plutocrat gains control of a system that can manage an army of autonomous killer robots. Normally such people have to contend with a principal cabinet of people who don't always agree with them. (Hitler and Stalin both had to argue with their generals.) An AI can proceed with a plan undisturbed by its inhumane implications.
My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex....
Media piracy is in the tradition of oyster piracy (stealing from landlords trying to control the oyster market) and the golden age (robbing the Spanish silver train that was exploiting the nations of the new world) in that it's crime against unreasonable state regimes.
This is not to say underground media sharing has always had the moral high-ground, and it's not even to say that fair copyright laws are unreasonable, but since the mid 20th century (since Disney, essentially) intellectual property law has not served the public in a community effort to build a robust public domain of ideas and content, rather has been used to do the opposite, to favor established businesses over new ones with complete disregard for the public.
But then there's the technological matter, where DRM is used to obstruct of sharing (reasonable or otherwise, legal or otherwise). Here in the states it's legal to use DRM to obstruct legal backups and sharing, but it's not legal to bypass DRM to facilitate legal backups and sharing. It shows us that our regulatory agencies are captured, that our government serves rich companies and plutocrats rather than the public. The law runs contrary to the social contract.
We are in an age in which our language (English) only has words for wrongdoing that acknowledges two authorities: Sin (wrongness against the Church -- allegedly against God) and Crime (wrongness against the state, in accordance to what laws are enforced by a legal system). When we talk about other entities that can be wrong, say, individuals, the community, the world population, ecosystems outside of human society, we have to make do with the words we have, e.g. sin against nature, crimes against humanity, and so on.
Intellectual property law is a construct that (according to the Constitution of the United States) was intended to do a thing that it has totally failed at, going as far as creating perverse incentives to misuse the law. And given the companies that produce the media we might pirate are poor at compensating artists and developers, or at recognizing licenses already established (say, your DVD copy of Ghostbusters when the new medium emerges), given they pirate each other's content shamelessly, and will steal yours outright if you can't outspend them in court, it has actually become more ethical to pirate content than to buy it legitimately.
But I'd teach my kids not just to pirate, but to recognize shoddy work from good work, and to not consume at all when they can, since consuming content benefits its producers, whether or not it's acquired legally. (The MCU is about hero-team organizations who defend the status quo from all enemies, including the far left, and including those who want the human species to have a future. So they're not really our heroes, are they? Batman runs around and beats up poor people, leaving the wealthy to continue to rule over the rest of us whose last resort is crime.
If we're going to consume content, let's use it to inspire the content we make ourselves, until commercial content is entirely unwanted and unnecessary. This is the future the MPAA and RIAA fear. Not everyone pirating their stuff, but everyone not bothered to pirate their stuff.
Collective voting efforts will slow the fascist push some, enough that sabotage, monkey-wrenching and the destabilization of the GOP might allow some efforts to re-empower the public to happen... or at least drive the MAGAs to start the civil war prematurely, putting them again on the side against the state.
Voting is important, but it's not the force for change we were promised it was.
For that we will have to expose the rich enough that everyone knows how tasty they are.
Oh and remember what the French did whenever the monarchists started rolling back civil rights.
It came up in The Boys, Season 2. It smacked of the Jews will not replace us chant at the Charleston tiki-torch party with good people on both sides. That's when I looked it up and found it was the same as the Goobacks episode of South Park ( They tooker jerbs! )
Subway's got a lot more problems than the unsavory personal life of its past spokesperson, but the sandwitch guy at the local one is just a wretch who doesn't get commissions (or, likely, tips) for his service. I'd take a look at John Oliver's main LWT segment on Subway Sandwiches.
However, the child sexual assault scandals and cover-ups of religious ministries is not unique to the Roman Catholic Church and but is epidemic among major ones, conspicuously centered around youth ministries.
And it's indicative of a system that doesn't sufficiently vet people who work with kids (contrast faculty of public schools) and aims more to silence victims and preserve the (now false) reputation of the church rather than preserve justice and transparency and care for the victims.
It speaks ill of organizations that allegedly carry God's favor that they feel compelled to keep secrets and allow sexual violence to fester within their own ranks.
A friend of mine is deeply Catholic, teaches high school American history, has progressive values (is pro-civil-rights) and explains it that he has a spot in his brain for all the church stuff, wheras the rest of his brain adheres to science and the secular morality we've developed through trial and error and beating back the dominance-minded shenanigans of plutocrats. I've met many Catholics like him.
But then theres Brett Kavanaugh and all the rest of the Federalist Society, who believe in pre-constitutional feudalism (so long as they get to be aristocrats).
So I'm pretty sure Catholics can be kind and compassionate and merciful despite their faith. But doing so is quite common.
More that our capitalist masters want us to be useful to them or not a burden, even if that means dying of starvation or exposure to the elements.
It's not personal, since they dont care why you aren't useful. If you were paraplegic or blind they'd want to toss you into a composting machine just as bad.
The female uses her ovipositor and extracts a single egg cluster from her egg sac. She then shoves it into the sperm bath located in the posterior thorax of the subdued male. Once the ovicluster is fertilized she will choose to depart, letting the male live. Or she will decapitate the male. Or she will consume the male, in whole or in part.
Once fertilized the female then finds and subdues a suitable host. Using her ovipositor, she attaches the ovicluster to the host's underside.
The eggs soon hatch triggered by the warmth of the host. Dozens of larvae burrow into the host and consuming it from the inside out to fuel their own growth. Instinctively, the larvae avoid vital organs until no other edible parts remain.
Once the host is consumed, the larvae exfiltrate the host's remains in search for a nearby suitable place it can pupate, making its own cocoon from available plant matter and its own saliva.
I tried a couple of times to make https://www.reddit.com/r/cuttingedgegaming/ happen, but never reached many people. This community seems to mostly folks playing 1-2 year old games, I wonder if there are more of us who are playing older (but not "retro") games, particularly PC games?
Have there been many cake is a lie moments recently? The only current game I quote frequently is Deep Rock Galactic, and that one is cheap enough and potato-friendly enough even for us PGs.
Oh yeah, DRG is the real deal. Not Alien: Fire Team Elite and not Back 4 Blood (of the 4-player short-mission co-op shooters out there inspired by Left 4 Dead)
May the 4th be with rule ( sh.itjust.works )
Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died ( www.seattletimes.com )
Michelle rule ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
Tr💰lley Pr💰blem ( sh.itjust.works )
Why there is so much communist propaganda on lemmy?
Even from people that never lived in a communist state...
What is a command you accidentally taught your pet?
My goldendoodle puppy doesn't ever want to come back inside. I told my beagle "go get your sister" as I tried rounding up the puppy. Now when I say "go get your sister" the beagle runs to the puppy and baits her into chasing him into the house.
Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps ( www.404media.co )
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...
julius rulius ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
Would you teach your kids how to pirate?
My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex....
vorule ( pawb.social )
Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt ( infosec.exchange )
Rulethlic Converts ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
rule ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
Rule of 400 ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
Biological rule ( sh.itjust.works )
Anyone else playing on a 5-20 year lag? ( xkcd.com )
I tried a couple of times to make https://www.reddit.com/r/cuttingedgegaming/ happen, but never reached many people. This community seems to mostly folks playing 1-2 year old games, I wonder if there are more of us who are playing older (but not "retro") games, particularly PC games?
Rules, regulations, or: why am I banned??? ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
==please incorporate the word rule in your post titles==...