Hilarious Paranoia

Robot artist Ai-Da released by Egyptian border guards: 

A British-built robot that uses cameras and a robotic arm to create abstract art has been released after Egyptian authorities detained it at customs. Ai-Da, named for the mathematician Ada Lovelace, was seized by border agents last week who feared her robotics may have been hiding covert spy tools. Officials held the robot for 10 days, imperilling plans to show her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday.

According to creator Aidan Meller, border guards seized Ai-Da because they had been suspicious of her modem, before then raising issues with her camera. Mr Meller offered to remove the modem, but said that he could not remove the cameras, which are essential to Ai-Da's ability to paint. The robot uses AI algorithms to turn what is recorded through its camera into works of art.

snowflakes, cowards idiots, losers, and AFRAID

21-10-1 >700K dead ⇨ LET'S STOP THE PLEASANT EUPHEMISMS: They aren't "anti-Vax." They're AFRAID OF GETTING VACCINATED! > .

"... we have to stop coddling the morons who will not get the shot. We start by calling them what they are. They are all snowflakes, and cowards and idiots, and losers, and, most importantly, they are afraid."

[I suspect that most of these oh-so-'Murican idiots are afraid that their friends, family, and community will despise them for succumbing to governmental pressure. Many of them will die for their ignorant obduracy. But hey, RepuGNican politicians don't care -------- just so long as they can grow rich collecting bribes from corporations.]

Racism = Attacking Irrelevant Features

Yes, the CCP has promulgated a DISinformation campaign. However, individual Asian Americans are NOT culpable, and should NOT be scapegoated by fearmongering white "supremacist" thugs:

Confront Anti-Asian Hate Crimes | Elizabeth Warren on COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act > .

Unacceptable "Norm"

MP Jess Phillips reads the names of UK women killed by men in the last year - BBC > .

Labour MP Jess Phillips listed all women killed in the UK over the last year where a man has been convicted or charged, in a debate to mark International Women's Day. She told Parliament that “killed women are not vanishingly rare, killed women are common”. The Birmingham Yardley MP was given dispensation by the deputy Speaker to break time limits to read the list of victims. She ended with the name of Sarah Everard, who disappeared a week ago, for which a serving male police officer is being questioned on suspicion of murder.

[Men killed by women in incidents of domestic violence? Probably zero.]

[Unsurprisingly, comments have been turned off and the video has been excessively down-thumbed (presumably) by males triggered by the temerity of an MP daring to list the 118 women (plus some of their children) killed by a dangerous subset of males.]

Jess Phillips: Society has 'just accepted' dead women:

Labour's shadow domestic violence minister, Jess Phillips, has said society has "just accepted" dead women as "one of those things". She read out the names of 118 women and girls killed in the UK this year, where a man has been charged or convicted as the primary perpetrator, in an International Women's Day debate. Ms Phillips said there was currently no government research into the data. Ministers say they have prioritised support for victims during lockdown.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: virtue signalling on immigration, BLM, MeToo dangerous - UnHerd > .

Multiculturalism has failed women, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali > .

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Prey and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast, discusses immigration, Islam and the erosion of women’s rights.

Pro Liberal Epistemology

UATX - Liberalism Resurgent ⇻

I should think so ...

Canada adds Proud Boys to terrorist list - CBC > .

Canada designates Proud Boys Arrogant Infants as terrorist organization beside Isis and al-Qaida: Move follows allegations that the rightwing wrong-wing group played a [key] role in the mob attack on the US Capitol on 21-1-6

"On Wednesday Bill Blair, public safety minister, also announced the federal government would designate the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups the Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist entities. The federal government also added offshoots of al-Qaida, Isis and Hizbul Mujahedin to its list.

“Canada will not tolerate ideological, religious or politically motivated acts of violence,” Blair said."

..

Ahead of the announcement, Canadian officials told reporters that they had been monitoring the Proud Boys Arrogant Infants before the Capitol Hill attack, but the event helped with the decision to list the organization.

The Proud Boys Arrogant Infants were founded in 2016 by the Canadian Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice magazine. The New York Times has described McInnes as a "far-right [far-wrong] provocateur." The group first made headlines in Canada three years ago, after five military reservists, dressed in the group’s black and yellow shirts, disrupted a protest by the Indigenous community over a controversial statue. The group was banned by Facebook and Instagram in October 2018 after violating the platforms’ hate policies and is classified as an extremist organization by the FBI.

The terrorist designation does not necessarily make it a crime to be a member of these groups, but it does mean that the group’s assets could be seized or forfeited by Canadian authorities.

[Canada has balls. It remains to be seen whether the USA will grow some cojones.]

Rabid homophobia = hypocritical internalized homophobia

A killer who stabbed three men to death in a Reading park has been handed a whole-life jail term: Khairi Saadallah murdered James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and 39-year-old Joe Ritchie-Bennett, in June last year in Forbury Gardens. London's Old Bailey previously heard the 26-year-old "executed" the [LGBT] men as an "act of religious jihad".

Given that research provides abundant evidence of the correlation:

a) between rabid homophobia and internal conflict about homoerotic urges

b) between religiosity and rigid authoritarianism

c) between violence and authoritarian parenting

and the inverse correlation between

d) religiosity and intelligence,   

Saadallah's deeper issues are not difficult to infer.

Hallelujah!

Not that there is a deity of any description to praise. Instead, I give thanks to Stacey Abrams and her organization ...

Georgia Senate election: Democrats take control with Warnock and Ossoff wins: [not, of course, that the world's most childishly-resentful LOSERS --- the authoritarian Fascisti of America, aka RepuGNicans, are likely to accept that election interference has NOT prevailed]

Examining America's Manifest Failings

Lawrence Lessig, "They Don't Represent Us" > . 

Comments disabled because Americans are aggressively partisan.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Male Loser Scorned

‘Hate is infectious’: how the 1989 mass shooting of 14 women echoes today: In Canada, 6 December is now a national day of remembrance and action on violence against women. The massacre at Montreal’s Polytechnique school, fueled by misogyny, is not a horrifying memory confined to a bygone era – rather it seems like a foretelling of things to come.

Two weeks ago, a young woman in Chicago was killed by a man after she ignored his catcalls. Last November, a man whose hatred of women was well-documented online shot six women at a hot yoga studio, killing two. And seven months earlier, a man named Alek Minassian drove a van on to a Toronto sidewalk and killed 10 people, eight of them women.

The sexually frustrated young man behind the van’s wheel – a self-described incel, or “involuntary celibate” – saw his act as retribution against women who had starved him of the affection he felt he was rightfully owed. Minassian said he was inspired by Elliot Rodger, an incel and wannabe pickup artist who shot 20 people in 2014.

The pseudonymous “Liz” (a volunteer researcher on hate groups in Canada who “outs” extremists – and who uses a fake name because of the volume of violent threats her alter ego receives) says misogyny is a powerful undercurrent in all alt-right-wrong and white "supremacist" online groups.

“Where do you really start to discuss the intersection between misogyny and hate groups, when they are really one and the same?” asked Liz, adding that hatred of women often serves as a base upon which to build other forms of hate.

Greedy RepuGNican Scammers

C*N*servative Pseudo-Christians Proselytizing for Greedy Power Mongers.

GRIFTERS > .
Get Rich Instantly Following Twitface's Egregious ReguGNican Snake-Kissers

History of Authoritarianism

Anne Applebaum writing for The New York Review of Books said of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin:

"Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone."

And another tragic event in a gun-crazed society

Santa Clarita Shooting Updates: Student Kills 2 at California High School:

A 16-year-old [male] student (at the school) pulled a handgun from his backpack at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif., on Thursday morning and shot five students, killing two ... The gunman was in grave condition after shooting himself in the head.

The gunman fired a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol in the quad of the school just after 7:30 a.m. and it was caught on video ... there were no more bullets in the gun when it was recovered.

The murdered students who died were a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. The other victims were identified as a 14-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy, all of whom were injured by gunfire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/us/santa-clarita-shooting.html .

Here’s a List of School Shootings in 2019: The attack at Saugus High School in California on Thursday is at least the 11th this year on a high school or college campus, which have resulted in at least six deaths.

Homogeneity vs Diversity

Sorting has occurred on both sides, but the Republican Party RepuGNican Partisanship has tended more toward homogeneity: whiter, more Christian and more conservative CONservative. Democrats are a far more diverse party. So although the term “identity politics” is often wielded to criticize the Democrats for focusing on race and gender, Republicans RepuGNicans are typically more susceptible to appeals based on their shared identity than Democrats, according to research by Julie Wronski and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Maryland, College Park.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/08/opinion/sunday/party-polarization-quiz.html .

The Deplorable State of Politics in America

Politics and Prose justifiably deemed it necessary to disable comments on this exposé of dysfunction in the McConnell-obstructed RepuGNican-commandeered embarrassment that is the US Senate. 

Michael Bennet, "The Land of Flickering Lights" > . 

"Bennet has represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate since 2009, earning a reputation as an independent thinker and a pragmatic centrist. In his closely observed analysis of today’s dysfunctional political landscape, he focuses on five key issues: the process for appointing judges, the recent tax cuts, the demise of the Iran nuclear agreement, the role of big money in politics, and immigration policies, examining each to illustrate exactly how and why partisan gridlock is undermining government. As he shows how much we’ve lost due to hyper-partisan politics, Bennet proposes specific ways we can re-establish a collaborative approach geared to helping all Americans rather than to benefiting one political party."

First the Empire, Next the "United"

U-u-u-g-g-g-g-h-h-h-h-h-h! > .

How LOW some RepuGNicans sink

RepuGNican Authoritarian Personality Disorder on display > .

Extremist Racism

When white supremacists overthrew a government > . 

Toxic "Masculinity" & Gun Violence

One of the disgusting aspects of American society:

Why is American masculinity violence-identification at the center of gun culture, but not the gun debate? > .

Preventing Narcissists and Psychopaths [like DUHnocchio] from Taking Power

Throughout history, people who have gained positions of power tend to be precisely the kind of people who should not be entrusted with it. A desire for power often correlates with negative personality traits: selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy. And the people who have the strongest desire for power tend to be the most ruthless and lacking in compassion.

Often those who attain power show traits of psychopathy and narcissism [almost identical]. In recent times, psychopathic leaders have been mostly found in less economically developed countries with poor infrastructures and insecure political and social institutions. People such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Charles Taylor in Liberia.

But modern psychopaths generally don’t become leaders in affluent countries (where they are perhaps more likely to join multinational corporations). In these countries, as can be seen in the US and Russia, there has been a movement away from psychopathic to narcissistic leaders.

After all, what profession could be more suited to a narcissistic personality than politics, where the spotlight of attention is constant? Narcissists feel entitled to gain power because of their sense of superiority and self-importance.

Those with narcissistic personalities tend to crave attention and admiration and feel it is right that other people should be subservient to them. Their lack of empathy means they have no qualms about exploiting other people to attain or maintain their power.

Meanwhile, the kind of people who we might think are ideally suited to take on positions of power – people who are empathetic, fair minded, responsible and wise – are naturally disinclined to seek it. Empathetic people like to remain grounded and interact with others, rather than elevating themselves. They don’t desire control or authority, but connection, leaving those leadership roles vacant for those with more narcissistic and psychopathic character traits.

http://theconversation.com/narcissists-and-psychopaths-how-some-societies-ensure-these-dangerous-people-never-wield-power-118854 .